Welcome to Pastor Recoil’s Parish, where I talk about some things that you may not have heard about in church, either because it’s not quite appropriate for all audiences or it just isn’t something that’s easy to talk about in a sermon. Today we’re talking about another of the big questions in Christianity: Who is Jesus?
Note: This post is a transcript of the video on the Pastor Recoil’s Parish YouTube channel, “Who is Jesus?” presented above.
Introduction
This is the second video of the Basic Topics in Christian Theology series. Last month, I talked about the question, “Who is God?” and discussed the Trinity and God the Parent. Today, I’m moving on to the second person of the Trinity, and talking about God’s Son — sometimes called God’s Word who became a human, Jesus of Nazareth.
I won’t really be telling you the story of Jesus — if you want that, read the gospels. Like the last video on God the Parent, this is talking about the bigger picture, and summarizing my own amalgamation of Christian thinking on God the Son over the centuries. The story will be present here, but this is more like interpreting the stories than a retelling.
Essential Attributes
It’s a bit interesting to talk about God the Son, because God the Son has, over the course of history, had the most controversy and disagreement around Him. The incarnation, which will come up a little later in this video, and with it the idea that part of the Trinity would become a human was so scandalizing to the early church that it spent a lot of its time debating how exactly all of that worked.
Because of this, if you’ve ever looked at the creeds of the church (such as the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed), most of their content is used giving specifics regarding the Son. The creed-writers used a lot of language from Greek philosophy to make sense of the Incarnation, mostly because they were familiar with it based on the time they were in. Sometimes it can lead to the creeds being a bit confusing-sounding, but they were all written to describe the “orthodox” view in response to various alternative views, which most of the creed-writers also decided was heresy and condemned those who believed them, kicking off a long trend in Christendom of punishing beliefs which differ from one’s perceived orthodoxy, but that’s a whole other story.
I will note here, unlike God the Parent, God the Son is canonically male, which is why I’m using “Son” rather than “Child” and male pronouns when I’m referring to God the Son. I’ve seen some scholarship that wonders if Jesus were intersex, or something similar, but in the Roman Judean world He entered, Jesus seems in all sources I’m aware of to present Himself as male to the world He lived in, so I’ll continue to use male pronouns for Him.
That said, while Jesus presents as male, He certainly does not ignore the feminine. He says, at one point, of Jerusalem, that He wants to gather the folk who live in Jerusalem to Himself like a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wing. Jesus’ masculinity is anything but toxic, but instead presents a healthy way of living as a human; I’d even go so far to say Jesus presents the best way for humans to live, as Jesus, even before His resurrection, lives a perfect human life.
I also said in the last video that I was going to describe each person of the Trinity with their essential characteristics, attributes, and work, but the Son is a bit different: instead I’m going to talk about the Son’s divinity and humanity instead, while still discussing the Son’s work.
Deity of the Son
I’ll begin by talking about the deity of the Son, before talking about the Son’s humanity in Jesus of Nazareth. After that, I’ll conclude with a rather long section on the work of the Son: I’ll cover the work of the pre-Incarnation Son in this section, but the work of the Incarnate and Ascended Son will be in that section.
Eternally Begotten
The most significant place to start with the Son is that the Son is eternally begotten of the Parent. One of the many controversies of the early church regarding the Son was if there was a time when the Son was not. This is another of those situations where there is weird language being used, because language is messy when it comes to describing the borderline indescribable. When thinking of God in Trinity though, it’s an important theological point that there never was a time when the Son was not, and, even though the Son is born by the Parent, that begetting always was. For as long as there has been God, the Parent births the Son.
Spiritual Being Made Physical at Incarnation
As to the nature of the Son, He began as a spiritual being — the Parent is a spiritual being so it makes sense that the Son would also be a spiritual being. But during and after the incarnation, the Son brought a physical body into the Trinity with the spiritual Spirit and Parent. That has some ramifications that I’ll discuss later on, but for now it’s important to know that while the Son began as a spiritual being, after the incarnation, the Son has a physical body which ascended into the Trinity.
The Word of God
I’ve been using “Son” as the main way of referring to the second person of the Trinity, but another term that’s used is “Word,” largely because of the opening bits of the Gospel of John. John the Evangelist — evangelist meaning ‘one who speaks the gospel,’ and gospel which means ‘good news’ — riffed on the opening chapter of Genesis to situate the Word spoken by God at creation as the one who became a human — Jesus of Nazareth.
The Word of God is spoken by the Speaker as the Son is begotten of the Parent. The spoken Word can’t be disconnected from the Speaker any more than the breath it’s spoken on can be, the breath being God’s Holy Spirit. So John the Evangelist says, when creation was spoken into being, following the account of Genesis 1, the Son is the Word God spoke to create. So while the Son is not the creator; the Son, by being God’s Word, was present at and involved in creation.
The Son Is Fully Divine
Another attribute of the Son is that the Son’s divinity does not come from Himself, but comes from the Parent — as I mentioned last month, the Parent is the source of divinity. This clarification came from yet another theory floating around early Christians, namely that the Son became the Son through the cross — which, admittedly the apostle Paul does imply in a few places — and so was a deified human rather than eternally divine. It’s more convincing to me that Son was always divine, and the events of the incarnation weren’t so much the acts which led to god-hood, but rather a perfect expression of that god-hood after setting it aside in the incarnation.
Coequality
Even while the Son’s divinity comes from the Parent, this doesn’t mean that the Son is subordinate to the Parent in any way. In the mystery of the Trinity, all three persons are coequal. The Parent isn’t “more deity” than the Son or the Spirit, neither is the Son “less deity” than the others. They all have an equal place within the Trinity, even though their roles are slightly different. This is another response to one of the views of the early Church, and the coequality of the Son, like so many of the things I’ve talked about regarding God, solves more issues than it causes.
Humanity of the Son
Now that I’ve talked about the Son’s divinity, it’s time to shift to the Son’s humanity. The Son has a bit of a unique place in the Trinity as He is fully human as well as being fully divine. I’ll talk about that union shortly, but first, I’ll take a little time to assert the humanity of the Son, through Mary His mother.
I should take a moment first to talk about terminology and names. Jesus of Nazareth is often called Jesus Christ, or Jesus the Messiah. This is in line with Christian interpretation of prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures which look ahead to a Messiah, an “Anointed One”, whom God uses to save God’s people. Anointed One in English is Christ in Greek and Messiah in Hebrew. One of the claims of Christianity which sets it apart from Judaism, and was the cause for its split from Judaism in the first century, is that Jesus of Nazareth is the promised Messiah, so this is why, in common usage, Jesus of Nazareth is referred to as Jesus Christ or just as “Christ.”
Incarnation
Back to the topic of the incarnation, we have in Scripture a couple of perspectives on what exactly happens in the Christ-event. Matthew’s gospel has a messenger of God announcing to Joseph, the man betrothed to Mary, that the child Mary was carrying is the Son of God. The apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi describes the Son setting aside divinity for a time out of humble, loving service to humanity. John’s gospel describes the Word of God, taking on human flesh and living temporarily with humans. And Luke’s gospel, well Luke spends the most time talking about Mary, Jesus’ mother. The incarnation is the time in which the Son of God “became meat” for a little while, setting aside their divine status and authority, to become not just like a human, but to actually be a human.
Aside about Mary
I do want to take a little moment (again, a lot of asides; I know) to talk about Mary. She tends to be looked at in two ways: nearly-deified alongside Jesus or ignored as a little girl who was caught up in events beyond her control. The picture of Mary we have from Scripture is neither of those things. Mary was a willing participant in what happened to her: by which I mean, to use modern language, she enthusiastically consented to carrying and raising God’s Son, even if the full picture of what that meant wasn’t available to her. She knew what might have happened to her if Joseph thought she was a liar. She also had some idea of what it meant to be a Messiah, even if she pictured a political savior rather than what Jesus turned out to be.
Mary also knew full well what was contained in Scripture; she famously sang a song when the words of Gabriel, the messenger who told her all this, were confirmed at her visit to her cousin Elizabeth, also miraculously pregnant. This song, called the Magnificat, is a very thorough description of God’s purposes through Jesus, singing about things like the overthrow of the proud and the uplifting of the humble and filling the hungry while leaving the rich empty.
I think turning Mary either into a sort of demigod or downplaying her influence both do her a disservice. I prefer to view her as a normal person who did amazing things, willingly consenting to be the mother of Jesus, even knowing some of what her son was going to do.
Jesus of Nazareth Is Fully Human
Back to Jesus now. By being born of Mary, Jesus is in every way human. He laughed; He cried; He ate; and, even though it isn’t recorded in the gospels because why would it be, He pooped. He did all the things that humans do, experiencing the things that humans do. Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Mary and (legally) Joseph was in many ways an ordinary dude, learning Joseph’s trade of carpentry and growing up like all of us do.
Union of Deity and Humanity in Jesus Christ
This union of divinity and humanity in Jesus has a fancy name — the hypostatic union — that I’m going to mention this one time and then probably never do again. This was another of the early controversies about Jesus, some of the views of which I’ve alluded to before. Some folk taught that Jesus was basically “God in a meat-suit,” not actually a human just having the appearance of one. Others taught that Jesus was a human who became divine, something not outside the realm of Greco-Roman philosophy. But the prevailing view was one in which Jesus somehow had both human and divine natures that were distinct and yet also united.
This is similar to the discussion about essence in the Trinity, but here instead of shared essences, these are two distinct essences joined together somehow. I’m sure you’re tired of hearing this phrase by now, but while this isn’t a perfect explanation, it’s one that seems to solve more problems than it causes.
The Son’s Divinity Is Not Lessened By His Humanity
In this Christ-event though, this doesn’t mean that the divinity of the Son is somehow lessened by the presence of Jesus’ humanity. Jesus is also not half-god, half-human, like so many of the demigods in Greek and Roman mythologies, but completely both.
This also means that Jesus’ humanity was kept from the corrupting influence of sin which affects humanity so strongly. I’ll talk more about what sin seems to be several videos down the road when I discuss salvation but for a very short version, sin is a kind of an umbrella term for the human tendency towards selfishness and violence, as well as a sort of pollution or impurity within a community. Jesus, as a human, would certainly be tempted towards sin, and was, but His divine nature as the Son of God kept Him from that sin by its very, well, nature. Even when Jesus’ humanity would be tempted, Jesus’ divinity would turn Him away from the selfishness, violence, and pollution of sin.
Humanity into the Trinity
The last aspect of the Incarnation that I want to talk about, before talking about the work that Jesus does, is the bringing of humanity into the Trinity itself. This is probably one of the biggest effects of the Incarnation, which I’ll refer to again when we talk about Jesus’ ascension. This is the beginning of God being with humanity forever, as humanity, through the Son, enters into the Trinity. Part of the ascension is bringing humanity into God’s presence, almost like a down payment on something that will come later. When humans are connected to the death and resurrection of Jesus, when we are raised like Jesus in a resurrection like His, we will also participate, somehow, in the mystery of the Trinity.
Work of the Son
So with all of that background out of the way, let’s now shift to talking more about the work of the Son of God through the lens of Jesus’ incarnation. I mentioned before some of the pre-incarnate work of the Son, being the Word spoken at creation through whom all things were made. But we know a lot less about the pre-incarnate work, because it’s just not talked about much in Scripture, so that’s kind of the only thing we can discuss. We know much more, though, about Jesus’ work during and after the incarnation, so that’s what I’ll focus on here.
Incarnation of Jesus
The primary way we know God is in the incarnation of God the Son in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Mary, who lived in Roman Judea in the early first century CE. I talked before about the humanity Jesus inherited from Mary, and the divinity He inherited from God the Parent, so I won’t go over that again. There are a few things I do want to go over in more detail about the incarnation though, starting with something specific to Jesus’ birth narrative that is important to many Christians: that He was born of a virgin.
Virgin Birth
This is something that gets mentioned in the creeds, and quite often when talking about His mother she gets an extra title — the Virgin Mary — so much that sometimes it feels like that’s an extra name she has. There’s only two times in the Christian writings that became Scripture where Mary’s virginity is mentioned, and one of them is more ambiguous than the other. Matthew’s gospel says that Mary was found pregnant and references the Greek translation of Isaiah which calls her a virgin; Luke’s gospel is a bit more explicit, where Mary comes out and tells God’s messenger that she hasn’t done the thing that leads to pregnancy.
Nonetheless, the idea of the virgin birth spread throughout the early Church. While it was debated during the second and third centuries CE, by the time of the Council of Nicea in 325, Mary’s virginity at the time of Jesus’ conception was made official doctrine.
Celsus and Panthera
There is one prominent refutation of the virgin birth from the first and second centuries CE, regarding a Roman soldier named “Panthera.” The strongest form of this argument was put together by a Roman philosopher and critic of Christianity named Celsus. Celsus’ work only survives in the third century work Against Celsus by Origen of Alexandria. In it, Celsus suggests that Jesus was the product of a liaison of uncertain consent with a Roman soldier named Panthera, quoting rumors that had been floating around at the time. It is a little interesting how closely the words “Panthera” or “panther” and “Parthenos” which means “young woman” or “virgin” are to one another, so the rumor could have begun with some anti-Christian punnery, rather than basing itself in any factual events. The rumor was so persistent that it continued into the medieval period.
Cultural Expectations
When it really comes down to it though, I don’t think the historicity of the virgin birth is as important as the message it presents. There’s been a lot of debate about how Jesus is free of original sin because He wasn’t conceived in the normal human way, which is usually the argument presented by followers of Augustine, but I don’t think that’s what’s really important in the story.
I think the virgin birth’s more significant importance is in how it uses tropes of Roman culture of the time to refute the norms of that culture, further establishing that the thing that God is doing is different from what the people already know. There were two things that were fairly common in Roman imagination: that the gods would have children with mortals and that the emperor was a god, or at least became one after their death. There also wouldn’t have been that much contention about a miraculous birth — their understanding of biology was good, but often was based on a lot of incorrect assumptions — so pregnancies and births that were unexplained might be a sign of something special, and birth stories were often edited to appear special if someone was a particularly important person.
So in Jesus’ birth narrative we have these two expectations being subverted in a way. Much like how the opening chapter of Genesis subverts Babylonian creation myths to show God as being a better god than Marduk, which I’ll go into more detail on in the creation video, the story of Jesus’ miraculous conception shows God as being more miraculous than the Roman gods. Roman gods were understood as having physical bodies with which to get physical with the women they impregnated. Meanwhile, God the Parent didn’t need to do that at all. God said it was going to happen, and Mary became pregnant with God the Son.
Jesus’ birth narrative also counters the deification of the Roman emperors. By the time Luke and Matthew were written, they were several cycles into this, and most of the Roman emperors had been declared divine by their successors. Jesus on the other hand, wouldn’t have needed to be deified, as He was already divine as the Son of the Parent. Jesus was also born in much more humble circumstances, and, especially in Luke’s account, comes with messages which are actively against the powerful. His preexisting divinity counters imperial divinity which was not inherent, but rather declared by one emperor about another.
God with Humanity
Those are more of a side effect of Jesus’ birth, though, and not the point. The primary purpose of the incarnation is for God to be with humanity through the Son, incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth. Up until the incarnation, the understanding was that God lived in a very special room in God’s temple — and while God was accessible there, it was only by a specific person at a few specific times. There was a divide between deity and humanity based on their natures: God was divine, humans were human, and humans couldn’t possibly be in the presence of divinity lest bad things happen to them.
Meanwhile, Jesus, the God-human, brings the presence of God to humanity by becoming a human. Jesus reveals the unknowable Parent to humans by being the perfect image of the Parent, living as humans ought to live and teaching other humans to do the same. Jesus becomes a bridge between humanity and divinity, and in doing so a few things happen.
For one, the incarnation becomes the first of what is to come in the new creation. Especially after His resurrection, Jesus shows us what it might be like when we are resurrected like Him, and points us towards the new creation in which humans and God are eternally together, and we can be in the presence of God, just like Jesus is — in body — after His ascension. Jesus is the first human to eternally be with God, and reconnects humanity and divinity without the corruption of sin to get in the way, sin being something I’ll talk about quite a bit later when we get to the salvation video.
But this isn’t just a one way connection. Through the cross and His suffering and death, Jesus also connects God to human suffering. Part of the mystery of the cross is that Jesus, the Son of God, suffered all that humans suffer, which I’ll talk about more later on in this video.
Life of Jesus
For now though, I’m going to start shifting away from things that happened because of the incarnation into the things that Jesus did while He was here on earth.
Jesus of Nazareth Is Human.
The most important part of the incarnation, really the essential thing that makes it important in the first place, is that Jesus of Nazareth was normal. Though there are plenty of non-canonical gospels which purport to share wild stories of Jesus accidentally killing and healing the other boys in Nazareth and other miraculous tales, I think it’s much more important for Jesus to be relatively ordinary. He needed to have the human experience, with its ups and downs and its losses and gains, to really be human. We don’t know for sure, but we can be pretty confident Joseph, the man who raised Him, died between Jesus’ 12th and 30th birthday, because once Jesus is an adult His earthly father doesn’t show up. Jesus was a bit of a precocious kid, since Luke shares a story of Him in the temple impressing the teachers there, but otherwise, I think the whole point was for Him to grow up in a poor, but stable home, learning a trade like His peers and having a typically human childhood, because otherwise He’d miss out on what it is to actually be human.
The Kingdom of God
When Jesus did finally grow up, He went around the regions of Galilee and Judea and started preaching and teaching about the kingdom of God. We’ll get to what the kingdom of God is all about soon, but in general it’s this idea which sums up all of the things that God’s rule in the world would represent. It’s the beginning of something that is to come, the breaking into our world of the new world in which the kingdom of God is complete, and so it is different from, in Jesus’ time, the empire of Rome and all empires that come after it. The kingdom of God is a place in which all humans are valued and welcomed and loved, and Jesus announces that kingdom both with His teaching and in the way He acted.
Invitations to Follow
Many of the things Jesus said and did were not new, but were more like a call to return to things the people already knew but had gotten away from. Connected to Jesus’ proclamation was an invitation to repent, to change one’s thinking and behavior, to reflect the new, in-breaking reality of the kingdom of God. Like many of the prophets before Him, Jesus called those around Him to bear witness to the kingdom of God, and invited them to proclaim that kingdom with Him, living out its values with words and actions.
Miracles and Signs
But had Jesus just been another teacher, He might have gotten lost in the sea of other teachers who taught similar things. But Jesus had something else going for Him: He worked miracles, especially healings. I ought to note here, even though we are generally skeptical of miraculous healings in our contemporary culture, that was not the case in Roman Judea. One of the few things Jesus’ followers and opponents could agree on, both in the works which became Scripture and outside of them, is that Jesus did in fact work miracles.
But Jesus didn’t just do miracles to make the lives of folk who were around Him better, though that was certainly an important part of it. Bettering lives of those people both showed what the kingdom of God will be like, asserting that in the kingdom there is no more sickness, suffering, or death, but it also gave authority to Jesus’ words about the kingdom. If Jesus could give sight to the blind, or heal the sick, or even bring back the dead, those miraculous things set Jesus apart as someone whom God was behind, and not just a random teacher yelling in the wilderness calling people to repent because the kingdom of God was coming.
Teachings of Jesus
So what is the kingdom of God? I already mentioned that it is an umbrella term for the new thing God is doing, but what does it look like? If it serves as the focal point of all of Jesus’ teaching and action, what is this kingdom all about?
Kingdom of God
Alternative Community
I’ve already mentioned how the kingdom of God is set up as an alternative community to that of the world, but I want to go in a bit more detail about that here first, because it’s probably most important thing about the kingdom of God.
The kingdom of God is a direct alternative to that which is offered by the kingdoms of the world. I’m drawing on the work of Walter Brueggemann here quite a bit, who describes the kingdom of God as an alternative community, and the kingdom of the world as “totalism.” Totalism encourages an affluence built on exploiting lower-class workers or enslaved people. It creates a state religion to justify itself which preaches an achievable salvation, but in doing so also crushes the hopes of those it exploits, because it cannot exist without that exploitation. To counter this, totalism must deny the existence of suffering and death, because for totalism to survive it must exist forever.
I’m sure this kind of totalistic system sounds a bit familiar. Meanwhile, the kingdom of God — this alternative community offered by God through Jesus of Nazareth — doesn’t care about affluence, it cares about reaching out to those same people exploited by totalism and promising a future without exploitation. The alternative community shares in the suffering of those oppressed by totalism and, rather than shying away from death, embraces the reality of death as the passage to new life. But more than this, the kingdom of God — this alternative community — brings hope in the midst of despair, and in doing so, offers something radically different: it offers a future in which totalism is completely dismantled in the new creation to come.
So what does this new community look like? How is the kingdom of God lived out and how did Jesus describe it?
Life in Community
The kingdom of God begins with community — acknowledging that humans are not meant to live isolated from one another but that there is solidarity in being together. Jesus doesn’t so much talk about this, though He does certainly imply it in the ways He teaches about human relationships, but He definitely lives it out. Jesus gathers several communities to Himself during His time on earth: there’s a core group of women who support Him financially; the Twelve, a core group whom Jesus focuses most of His time and energy on ; the Seventy, the ones who were sent out early on in Jesus’ ministry and, according to tradition, all went on to be prominent personalities in the early Church.
Loving One Another
Because humans live in community, one of the key aspects of Jesus’ teaching is loving one another. This is expressed in two ways. In what are called the synoptic gospels, because they tell basically the same story, the gospels of Mark, Luke, and Matthew offer a reinterpretation of loving God as “Love your neighbor as yourself,” appealing to human selfishness a bit to encourage humans to act well towards one another. John’s gospel presents something similar, but as “Love one another as I [I being Jesus] love you.” There’s even a few times when Jesus teaches us to love our enemies — to wish well even for those who would seek to hurt us.
The idea is to not always look to one’s own best interest, but instead to work for the best interests of those around us. This can of course be manipulated, and lead to self-harm, but that’s not what Jesus is describing here. The only way that we can really exist in community together is to acknowledge our inherent shared humanity and seek to consider the consequences of our own actions as they may apply to others. Sometimes this may mean sacrificing our own well-being for the sake of someone else, but the exact way that plays out will depend on the situation. Love is messy, but it’s also central to what it means to live well together in an actual community.
Forgive One Another
Another aspect of living in community, and one that is connected to loving one another, is forgiving one another. Now, I always like to be incredibly clear here: forgiveness is not about the person who needs to be forgiven. Forgiveness is about the person who has been wronged letting go of feelings of vengeance towards the person who wronged them. I’ve done another video on this that I’ll throw a card up for. When we forgive others, we don’t allow others to treat us poorly, but we let go of feelings that cause us pain so that we can continue the healing process.
Interestingly enough, Jesus usually discusses forgiveness in economic terms. The best translation of the famous line in the Our Father, the prayer that Jesus taught His disciples to pray, is “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” This of course has some interesting ramifications for lending, if proclaimers of the kingdom of God are meant to forgive debts. Whereas sometimes sin is seen as a pollutant, other times as violence, here we see sin as a debt that we owe one another. Forgiveness is letting go of the payback we are owed.
Whenever we spend time with other humans, the need for forgiveness inevitably comes up. The kingdom of God encourages us to forgive freely, even while being wise in reconciliation and rebuilding broken relationships.
Serve one another
Another aspect of the kingdom of God is in sharing resources so that everyone in the community has enough. This doesn’t mean creating a system in which everyone has exactly what they want, but it means ensuring that basic needs are met; like housing, food, healthcare, and all of the things that are essential for life. If we have more than enough, in the kingdom of God we share from our excess to benefit someone who lacks. In the early church, that was lived out through a sort of communism, as everyone shared what they had with one another so that everyone’s needs were met. As the movement grew, gatherings of Christians in one city who had enough would share with Christians in another city who didn’t have enough. In contemporary life, this looks different still, but the idea of giving of ourselves and our goods to others who need them more than we do is still important in the kingdom of God.
Great Reversal
These things that I’ve talked about — living in community and loving, forgiving, and serving one another — are all ways that one of the other priorities of the kingdom of God plays out: the idea of the Great Reversal. This shows up especially clearly in the gospel of Luke, though it is present in the other gospels as well. The Great Reversal is that the last shall be first and the first shall be last. This has economic consequences, where the rich are made poor and the poor are enriched; social justice consequences, as the hungry and crying swap situations with the full and laughing; as well as political consequences, as the powerful and prideful are cast down while the powerless and humble are lifted up.
Ethics
All of these things together give us an idea of the ethics of the kingdom of God. This isn’t all there is, but it’s the foundation on which the rest of a kingdom ethic is built. It all begins with love, and through love, other things develop. If we love one another, we’ll always be honest in our interactions. We’ll work for justice, because love calls us to seek the best outcomes for all people. Love leads us to have compassion, to forgive others, to show mercy, to give of ourselves to others, and much more.
But one of the most interesting ways the ethics of the kingdom plays itself out is in nonviolent resistance to oppressive, totalistic regimes. In recent history, Martin Luther King, Jr. applied the ethics of God’s kingdom to respond to the injustice of the Jim Crow South in America, but this did not begin with Dr. King. Many of the examples Jesus uses in the sermon on the mount regarding turning the other cheek, giving your shirt to someone who asks for your coat, and going the extra mile all make obvious how inappropriate certain practices are as they treat certain classes of humans as less than others. The kingdom of God invites ways to turn oppressive systems back on themselves, and in doing so undermines the system to show a better, more just, and more loving way forward.
Death of Jesus
This is just a brief overview of the things that Jesus taught during His time on earth, but now I’m going to transition to the central point of the Christ event: Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension. Without these three things, Jesus is just another teacher in Judea in the first century CE. Sure, He would have taught some good things — most of us will agree that the things Jesus taught are good advice for us to live as humans together — but what makes Jesus special, and what makes the kingdom of God the beginning of something new to come, is that Jesus of Nazareth died, is risen, and has ascended to the Parent again.
Sacrifice of the Son
Now there is something I want to mention first to get it out of the way. There’s a common critique of Jesus’ death, which I’ll agree is valid, that God killed God’s Son to resolve a debt that God created. This comes out of an atonement theory called Penal Substitutionary Atonement, which came out of the work of the 11th Century theologian Anselm, and which Martin Luther and other reformers ran with in the 15th Century. I’ll get into this more when we get to the Sin and Salvation video, but simplifying the cross down to “paying the debt we owe God because of our sin” is far too transactional for me, especially because it implies that God can’t just forgive sin without some manner of sacrifice, something I am not on board with. If God is actually love, that does not seem like a loving action; it seems incredibly manipulative and not like love at all.
That said, there is a sense, especially in the Hebrew Scriptures, that there is supernatural power to be gained by sacrificing one’s own child, especially a firstborn son. There’s an event recorded in 2 Kings 3 in which the king of Moab sacrificed his son and heir to their god Chemosh, which empowers the Moabites to rout a coalition army from Israel, Judah, and Edom. Following those threads in the Hebrew Scriptures, that the Parent would be willing to sacrifice even Their Son, importantly with the Son’s full consent, for the sake of humanity connects some of these threads and shows the love that God has for humanity, emphasizing the power of God present in Jesus’ death and resurrection.
“The King of the Judeans”
Another important thing to remember about Jesus’ death is that He was executed by the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, for treason. Crucifixion was meant as a very public means of executing the kind of person Rome wanted to make an example of, so that any who might come after them don’t try something similar. Jesus’ crime was being “King of the Judeans,” and Rome does not abide any kings in their domain except the ones they nominate.
Jesus didn’t exactly do a lot to disabuse Rome of this notion either. He came into Jerusalem in a way that alluded to a popular Messianic prophecy about the successor to King David’s throne coming to restore self-rule to the Jewish people. He then did everything He could to frustrate the religious leaders who had Rome’s ear, who encouraged Pontius Pilate — who was already in a bad situation with Emperor Tiberius due to his friendship with an executed traitor named Sejanus, and threatened with removal due to his violent reprisals to a previous rebellion — to execute the apparent rebel, Jesus, to prevent another rebellion from happening.
Later Christians, after the destruction of Jerusalem in the First Jewish-Roman War, and especially once the Roman Empire legitimized Christianity and made it the official religion of the Empire, tried to shift blame away from Rome and onto the Jewish people, which led to a whole heap of violence and harms done to the Jewish people at the hands of Christians who incorrectly blamed them for killing Jesus. This is one of many ways that Christians have done harm to Jews, and we have been wrong to do so.
Jesus’ execution at the hands of Rome further illustrates the divide between the alternative community of the kingdom of God and the totalistic Roman Empire. Though it wasn’t Jesus’ teachings that caused His execution, Jesus embraces His own suffering and death even as Rome enforces the order it so craves and eliminates a perceived threat to its future in the alternative community which promises a future without Rome.
God Suffers with Us
As Jesus embraces His own death and suffering, He reveals God’s nature as love by experiencing that thing that all humans experience: suffering and death. The Son certainly didn’t need to suffer, nor did He need to die, but by enduring the cross, God the Son brings the suffering of all humanity into the Trinity. This is another of those things where we are confident that it happened, but the question of how is uncertain, so it gets the title of mystery: something that is outside of our understanding that we understand as true even if the mechanism is unknown.
This connection between the suffering of God and the sufferings of humanity also encourages us to live out the values of the kingdom of God, as relieving the suffering of our fellow humans also relieves the sufferings of Jesus. That shouldn’t be our primary motivation — love is what truly draws us to help one another — but it adds another aspect to the work we do for others, especially when they are suffering harm, loss, sickness, oppression, or injustice. The suffering Christ is with all of humanity, and in dying, we see God’s nature through His loving sacrifice.
God (the Son) Dies with Us
But more than just connecting with human suffering, the death of the Son also brings death into the immortal Trinity. Part of the corruption of sin in the world is death, and all life in the world we know will inevitably end in death, despite any of our best efforts to the contrary. On the cross, Jesus somehow takes on the sin of the world and experiences the death that is sin’s direct result.
In doing so, the cross introduces a separation within the inseparable Trinity, one that a multidimensional understanding of God helps to make a bit more sense of, though I won’t be going into all of that detail at the moment. In short, the cross is a one-time event for us, but an event which affects the Trinity outside of time. God doesn’t change because of the cross-event, and yet God has always been changed by the cross-event, because death entered the Trinity. This draws on some of the work of theologian Jürgen Moltmann, especially the book The Crucified God, though he is not the only source I’m using here.
Because part of the corruption of sin includes a separation of humanity and God, when Jesus cries out on the cross, “My God why have you forsaken me,” He is experiencing that separation, just as the Parent is experiencing the separation from the Son. Even more, when the Son dies on the cross, the Son suffers death, the Parent suffers the death of Their Son, and the Spirit suffers the separation of They who cannot be separated. The death of the Son deeply affects the Trinity, in ways that are experienced eternally in both directions, precisely because God is outside of our awareness.
God with Us in Death
And then, something weird happens. Now I don’t mean it’s weird as in it’s out of our ordinary. I mean that it’s weird in that it’s generally agreed in Christian thinking that it happened, but there aren’t many explanations of what happened when it happened. The now-deceased Jesus goes to the realm of the dead, wherever it is that the dead go, and proclaims the kingdom of God there.
Part of the complication for this is that our contemporary understandings of where people go when they die are very different from a Greco-Roman understanding of where people go when they die which is also very different from a first century Jewish understanding of where people go when they die. Even more confusing is that the New Testament is inconsistent in its own language, often using Greek words to refer to Jewish ideas, which gets the Jewish ideas confused with the Greek ideas. Needless to say, it’s a complex problem.
And yet, in most statements of faith throughout the centuries, it is agreed that Jesus went wherever the dead go and proclaimed the kingdom there. So something happens in the realm of the dead, wherever human spirits are at rest, where they hear the gospel from Jesus while He is dead.
This is something that I don’t have a lot of certainty about, I admit, precisely because it is mentioned so little within Scripture. If I remember, I will talk about this a bit more in the “what comes next” video on eschatology, since it fits in with how I think about the ultimate fate of humans, so I’ll save most of this discussion for then.
Resurrection of Jesus
So with all that explanation out of the way, here’s the quick summary: Jesus dies, the Trinity experiences a separation it has never experienced before, and because of this, something new happens. After three days (counting inclusively for those who like to pick nits about dates) Jesus is resurrected, and in Christian thinking, this world is never the same.
Inbreaking of the Kingdom
Before His death, Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God, and taught and lived what the kingdom of God is. By rising from the dead, Jesus is the beginning of that kingdom breaking into our world, beginning the process of reconstructing what we know into a world in which there is no more sin, violence, oppression, suffering, sickness, or even death.
After the ascension, those folk whom Jesus gathers together — the Church — becomes the proclaimer of this kingdom of God, the alternative community to totalism. I’ll talk about that aspect of the church when we get to that video in several months now, but for now that’s the important thing to know: the Christian church is those gathered people who are supposed to bear witness to the new future breaking in, even if we are often quite bad at what is, at its core, our only job.
Victory over Sin and Death
More than beginning that which will find its culmination at the end of this world, by rising from the dead, Jesus also destroys the power of death, because the love of God in Trinity is stronger than the corrupting power of sin which introduced death. This is another of those mysteries of the church; I admit I don’t know the mechanics of how this works, but I trust that it does. Jesus’ resurrection is the first of a resurrection for all humanity, and is the beginning of the renewal of all of creation. The resurrection means that death is not the end of life on earth, but rather a path to a new life that will never end.
There’s a ritual of the church, baptism, which explicitly connects humans to Jesus’ death and resurrection. I’ll talk about that in the rituals video. For now, one of the traditions we hold on to is that as Christ died and rose, in baptism going into the water connects us to Christ’s death and leaving the water connects us to His resurrection.
Because of this connection, we have hope that there is something coming that is as perfect as our current world is not. For the early Christians, a group largely made up of people on the margins of society, this enabled them to do things they might not do if the life they had was all there was. The same goes for many oppressed Christians today, who cling to the resurrection hope which promises a life without the things they are suffering today.
Resurrection hope gets a bit corrupted though, when it turns into a “get out of this world free” card. Remember that the resurrection is not an invitation to ignore the world as it is, because the church is called to bear witness to the new reality to come in the world that we have now. Our hope is not just for us; it is meant to be shared, especially with those who are on the margins. We don’t just promise a better world, we work for that better world by proclaiming it in word and action, and the promise of the perfect kingdom of God to come strengthens us for those times when the work in this world is frustrating.
First of a Resurrection for All
I alluded to this already as I talked about baptism, but the victory of Jesus Christ over death also means that we humans will be resurrected just like He is resurrected, in a changed human body that can be in the presence of God the Parent, and even can be invited into the relationship of the Trinity itself. Humans will be brought into the presence of God, just as the bodily ascended Jesus is in the presence of God now.
We don’t know what this resurrected body will be like. There aren’t even all that many details about Jesus’ resurrected body, except that it appears to be able to teleport from place to place and is capable of eating food — admittedly strange details to include. But He is certainly different. There is a joke floating around the internet about “zombie Jesus,” and my response is that Jesus is much more of a lich than a zombie, even though the Dungeons and Dragons ruleset doesn’t fully explain the resurrected body of Jesus either. This is another of those areas which are somewhat outside human imagination, even as it’s something we can assert is true, like many others of the mysteries of faith.
Ascension of Jesus Christ
The resurrected Jesus spent about a month and a half with His disciples, before returning to God the Parent in what we call the Ascension. In a lot of Christian circles, the ascension isn’t talked about much, but it’s a very important event for understanding what Jesus is up to now.
Ascension in Body
For one thing, Jesus didn’t ascend in spirit, leaving a body behind. He ascended as a whole person, complete with His physical body, into heaven. This means that when Jesus went to the right hand of the Parent, a figurative term for taking a position of power, that a human being is now in the Trinity. That’s not something to take lightly: a human, even though a resurrected human, has been invited into the relationship of God in Trinity.
This has some important repercussions, because Jesus’ resurrected body entering into the Trinity also opens the door for us ordinary humans to do the same when we are resurrected. This is part of what “being with God” forever means. We will take on just enough of the qualities of deity to be in God’s presence, a process called divinization or theosis depending on which theological tradition you’re a part of. This doesn’t mean that we will become little gods, but that we will be like God, because we will be resurrected in a way similar to Jesus’ own resurrection. And it all begins with Jesus ascending, physically, to return to the Parent whom He left to become a human.
Sending the Holy Spirit
Before ascending, though, Jesus promises His disciples to send something after His ascension: sometimes called power, an advocate, a comforter, and other things. On the day of Pentecost, fifty days after Jesus’ resurrection, that promised thing happens and God’s Holy Spirit lands on Jesus’ disciples in power. Jesus has something to do with that, but the exact mechanism is part of one of the single largest controversies in Christendom, and it’s all based in one word in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed from the 4th Century CE: filioque.
The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, usually called the Nicene Creed, is one of the statements of faith decided by a council of the whole church at the time, often a gathering of bishops — those folk who were leaders in their respective churches. In the original text of the Creed, there is a line which says the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the [Parent].” By the 6th Century, Western Christian churches, meaning those who followed Rome rather than Constantinople, added a word to that statement: filioque. (Filioque is a Latin word which means “from the Son.”)
Basically what it all comes down to is if the Holy Spirit comes from the Parent alone or from the Parent and the Son equally. Most churches from the Western tradition, which are Roman Catholics and the overwhelming majority of Protestants like Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Methodist, Baptist and all the others, say the Spirit proceeds from the Parent and the Son, but most Eastern churches, like the Greek Orthodox, say the Spirit only proceeds from the Parent.
My own tendency is to say the Spirit proceeds from the Parent through the Son, involving the Son in the process, since Jesus says He is in the gospels, but maintaining the Parent as the source of divinity. I’ll go into a bit more detail about this controversy next month with the Holy Spirit video, but for now I’ll leave it there.
Purification of Humanity
So I’ve mentioned that Jesus ascended back to the Parent, but what is Jesus up to now that He is there? That’s what I’m going to wrap up this already-long video talking about, the work the ascended Son is doing now that He has returned to the Father.
One of the biggest things Jesus is doing is continuing the atoning work begun with the cross, ensuring the continued purification of humanity from sin until He returns and everyone is resurrected. The author of the letter to the Hebrews likens this work to that of the High Priest at the Jewish Temple on the Day of Atonement.
Day of Atonement in Temple
The Day of Atonement is one of the festivals God ordains in the Hebrew Scriptures, and continues to be one of the most important festivals in Modern Judaism, called in Hebrew Yom Kippur. In an era where there was a tabernacle or temple to perform this work in, the high priest would enter the extra-holy place, the place where God “lived,” to sprinkle the altar that was God’s seat with the blood of a sacrificed animal.
This sprinkling cleansed the people of the corrupting influence of sin for a time, as the sprinkling of the blood was a purification ritual. Meanwhile, outside the extra-holy place, a goat, called a scapegoat, would symbolically receive all the collective sin of the people and be sent out into the wilderness, and with it would go all the people’s sin over the year so they could be pure before God.
Continual Atonement in Heaven
The author of Hebrews uses the language of the Day of Atonement to understand the work that Jesus is doing in the presence of God. On the cross, Jesus was both sacrifice and scapegoat; He is both the animal whose blood will be sprinkled on the altar and the one who took on the corruption of sin from humanity. Jesus’ death functions as the “sending away” of the scapegoat. Now, having ascended into God’s presence, Jesus sprinkles His own blood on a heavenly altar, continually working out the purification of humanity from their sin.
This is almost certainly not language that the writer of Hebrews meant for us to take literally, but it’s using language of the work of the temple, language the early Christians would be familiar with, to describe the indescribable work that Jesus is currently doing. Jesus is continuing to work out the atonement of humans until the time He returns; the exact details of how Jesus is doing that remains a mystery.
Interceding for Humanity
In addition to continuing to work out humanity’s atonement, Jesus is also interceding for us humans. Sometimes this gets thought of in legal terms, and that makes me uncomfortable. A common image of Jesus’ intercession for us paints the image of a heavenly courtroom: God the Parent (who is always referred to as Father in this kind of image) is the wrathful judge deciding our case; Satan, the adversary, is the prosecutor, bringing all of our sins up to God; Jesus is our defense attorney, defending us with His sacrifice in our place on the cross. There’s a lot of problems with this, some of which I’ll talk about in the sin and salvation video, but the biggest problem is it turns God the Parent into a jerk!
Instead, I see Jesus’ intercession as being twofold. First, the work that Jesus is doing is work for our good. Jesus is praying for us to the Parent; Jesus is doing things to help our lives be better. The details are scarce, but we can be confident that Jesus is working for our good. The other aspect of this is that Jesus is mediating the relationship between humanity and the Parent, through the Holy Spirit, until the time of the resurrection when that mediation will no longer be required because we will be like Christ in the presence of the Triune God. Jesus is the human presence in the Trinity preparing a place for all humanity, and working to bring about the kingdom of God, both on earth now and in the world to come.
Gathering Everything to Himself
As part of Jesus’ intercession for us, along with the work of purification He does for us, Jesus is gathering all things to Himself. Jesus gathers the church, the world, and everything together, in preparation for the same new heaven and new earth that is to come. This is another of those areas that are a bit vague; we don’t know what the fulfillment of this is going to look like, but there are some areas that we can look at to see what is happening.
One example is individual congregations, those places that are meant to be pockets of the kingdom of God in this world. Jesus gathers people into these places whom Jesus means to be in these places. This is an important reminder for me as a pastor, especially when I get frustrated by the folk whom I serve, because I know that Jesus brought these folk to me for a reason. They are in the church because Jesus gathered them there. Outside of that pastoral consideration, it’s also a good reminder that the people who cross my path as a follower of Jesus are people whom Christ is gathering as well, and I never know if they are in my path because they are in need something that I can do for them, so I should treat every person with the inherent value they have as a fellow human, as well as a person to whom I am representing God.
Lord of All
The final part of the ascended Jesus’ work that I want to mention is that Jesus is King of kings and Lord of Lords. This is language that is odd to us, being used to diffuse power and democratic systems, but it’s language that, for early Christians, would speak in opposition towards Rome and, for us later Christians, speaks against anything that would seek to install an imperialistic totalism.
Jesus’ rule is counter to the rulers of our world. It is built not on selfishness, or personal power, or a desire to tell others what to do; but Jesus’ rule is built on the values of God’s kingdom: love, humility, peace, and justice; with no hidden agendas or selfish motivations. The rule of Jesus is the ultimate alternative community against totalism, and Jesus is the head of that alternative community of the kingdom of God, which is above all other kingdoms, and His rule will come to fruition when Jesus returns in glory.
Return of Jesus Christ
Returning in Glory
And it is that return in glory that I have finally come to. That, when the time is right and all is ready, this current world will die or be destroyed (depending on how one wants to look at it) and a new world will begin or be resurrected, one which is the fulfillment of all the hope that began with Jesus’ resurrection.
In this new world, everything that is wrong with our current world will be set right, the powers of totalism will be defeated, and a restored creation will come to be, in which there is no death, suffering, sickness, or violence. In this, the kingdom of God will be fully realized, the alternative community will become the true community, and all of humanity and creation will be part of it.
Jesus will appear again in a way similar to His ascension, and all of the dead will be raised and judged. In a perfectly just way, the poor and the oppressed will receive eternal rest from their sufferings, and the rich and the oppressors will also be redeemed and purified. Most of the details of how this works out are murky and buried in what can certainly be read as a revenge fantasy, but, I’ll talk quite a bit more about this when I get to the end times video in several months.
Handing the Kingdom to the Parent
Once Jesus has returned, and the new, resurrected and restored creation has reached its completion, Jesus will return all the authority that was given Him to the Parent, and the Triune God will be together with humanity forever. Humanity will participate in the divine relationship, bringing things full circle from the very beginning of all things to its new beginning in perfect relationship to each other and to God.
Summary
And that picture of the end wraps up this very long video on God the Son, Jesus of Nazareth, who died, is risen and ascended, and who will come again. I talked about His teachings, and about the effects of those big events which echo through eternity. Next month I’ll talk about the more shy member of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.