Because Ideas Cannot Bleed

Because Ideas Cannot Bleed--December 26, 2017

"By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God..." [1 John 4:2]

"Vulnerable" is a charged word.  Nobody likes to be called "vulnerable," and nobody wants to admit their own vulnerability, or any kind of susceptibility to weakness.  

After all, these are days in which so much talk around us is about "greatness," "strength," and "winning," and being vulnerable sounds so much like being least, being weak, being a loser.  

Nobody likes to be called vulnerable themselves, and we generally don't like the idea of our God being "vulnerable," because that sounds like God being defeated, or broken, or beaten... and if our God (or "god"?) is vulnerable, then my goodness, that doesn't look very good on us, does it? Oh deary my, the conventional wisdom says, you don't want to give the impression that your God--your religion--is weak, or vulnerable, or not in control and "winning", do you?  No, no, no, they say--you need to project power and look tough, and you need to make your god/God look invulnerable, too.

Yeah, "vulnerable" is a charged word these days--and yet, to hear the Bible tell it, it is at the heart of our faith.  To believe in a God who "has come in the flesh" in a human life is, by definition, to believe in a God who chooses vulnerability, as scandalous as that may sound.

Or to put it more directly, from the perspective of the New Testament, there is no true God but a vulnerable one.

And in particular here, John insists that we understand that Jesus, the very Word and Son of God, really came and lived among us in the flesh.  God really did crash into our lives in a new way by being present in Jesus, and that means we really do get to know what God is like by learning the stories of Jesus.  Against all the other mystery religions and cults and philosophies of the first century, the early Christians insisted that God wasn't too distant to relate to us in the physical, flesh-and-blood life of a human being, and a rather ordinary-looking human being at that, from a backwater province of conquered people on the eastern fringe of the Roman Empire.  The philosophers and other mystics were convinced that any deity worth his salt wouldn't--indeed, couldn't--associate with the likes of finite, fragile, physical beings, but had to stay more or less in the ethereal realm of spirits and souls and other invisible things.  They could conceive of a savior coming to teach us new ideas, new modes of contemplation or mystical truth, but no divine savior from God could actually be one of us.  That just seemed preposterous.

And like I say, against all of that, John here insists that Jesus, the Savior and the Son of God, really did come among us as one of us, not just a vision or an idea or an apparition.  That means God chooses vulnerability, because being human means a certain amount of vulnerability.

Frederick Buechner notes it powerfully in a reflection on the birth of Jesus.  In a piece from his book, The Hungering Dark, Buechner writes:  "The child born in the night among the beasts. The sweet breath and steaming dung of the beasts. And nothing is ever the same again. Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of man. . . . For those who believe in God, it means, this birth, that God himself is never safe from us, and maybe that is the dark side of Christmas, the terror of the silence. He comes in such a way that we can always turn him down, as we could crack the baby’s skull like an eggshell or nail him up when he gets too big for that."

Buechner's point is just the same as John's here today--the God we meet in Jesus chooses vulnerability, which means God has chosen the weakness of infancy all the way to the desperation of death.  There is no true God but the vulnerable One.

Ideas cannot bleed, some people are fond of saying.  And usually that is meant as a compliment to ideas, a testament to how an idea can endure even when generations of actual people rise and fall.  Christians would agree that ideas cannot bleed, but we do not necessarily see that as a sign of the superiority of ideas to people.  Because an idea cannot be hurt, cannot suffer, cannot give its life for anyone, it also means that an idea cannot love.  And as far as Christians are concerned, the world's only hope for being rescued from its own brokenness is for God to love the world and redeem it, not for God to bombard us with a new idea to try and get us to think our way into heaven.  Jesus is the sign for us that God is not just interested in giving us new ideas to contemplate, but indeed is willing to be hurt for us and for our sake--even at our own hands. 

For John, this is the lynchpin of our faith--either we worship a God who is not afraid to come so close as to enter our human lives as one of us, who is unafraid to be entwined in the turns and tangles of human history, who is unafraid to hurt for us and to bleed for us, or we are stuck only with an idea of a distant God who may have helpful suggestions to offer us, but who can only appear to come close without ever being touchable.  And as John tells us here, if we give up on the idea that Jesus really came among us in the flesh, we've missed the whole point of the faith, and the good part of the Good News, which is all about a God who will not stay off where it is safe in a distant heaven or in the safety of the realm of theory and ideas.

The take-home point for us today then, is this:  ideas can't bleed.  We Christians are fooling ourselves if we think what we have to share with the world is just a new idea for ethics or morality, or a set of timeless principles.  Ideas can change the world, but they cannot redeem the world, because an idea cannot love or sacrifice itself.  Only a Person can do that.  Our message to the world, and to our neighbors and friends around us, then, is not "Hey, listen to this new idea we have about God!" but "Come meet the living God for yourself, the God who loves the world enough to suffer for it in the person of Jesus."  Our calling is to help people to know this Jesus.

O God of genuine love, let us know your love more and more fully today, so that we can share it with others beyond the sterility of ideas and theories.