The "God-ness" of God--January 3, 2020

The "God-ness" of God--January 3, 2020

"For in Christ the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority." [Colossians 2:9-10]

So it really does come down to this: if you've seen Jesus, you've experienced the God-ness of God.

That's a pretty important idea.  And it's a pretty radical thing to say, both about Jesus, and about God.

I mean, think about it for a moment.  If I went to the new Star Wars movie and said to you, "You don't need to go--I'll just summarize the story for you," you would laugh in my face.  The fullness of the "Star Wars movie experience" is not having a nerdish pastor recap the plot for you in a few sentences--I can't recreate the spectacle of spaceship dogfights on a huge screen, or the majesty of John Williams' classic movie score, or the nostalgia of seeing beloved faces like Mark Hamill's Luke Skywalker one last time.  I might get the gist of the plot points to you, but that's not the fullness of seeing the movie in a theater.  My goodness, most people will even tell you that watching the movie version of what was originally a novel doesn't convey the fullness of the original book!  

Or if I told you that you didn't need to bother going to the art museum because it's just a bunch of paintings with a bunch of different colors... or if I told you that it's not worth seeing the Statue of Liberty in person if you can just imagine a lady in a toga holding a torch.  You would say to me that I have ludicrously overestimated by ability to convey the fullness of any of those experiences.

So how dare anybody say that you can encounter the fullness of God anywhere?  In anything?  Ever!?  Honestly, I wouldn't claim to say that you could experience "the fullness of God" by sitting in a pew in church, or singing a hymn with the organ going full blast, or even with all the candles lit for Silent Night on Christmas Eve.  You can't get the fullness of God by going to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem or St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican or the Castle Church in Luther's Wittenberg.  Nobody would dare to suggest even in those famously hallowed halls that the "fullness" of God is contained there... and yet, the New Testament claims that God's fullness comes to us, not in a vast building with vaulted ceilings, but in the human life of one Jesus of Nazareth.

It is a radical claim about Jesus--that one human life is capable of bearing the fullness of God, when I can't even convey the fullness of a two-hour movie to you when I retell the story to you after I've seen it.

And at the same time, it is a radical claim about God, too.  The writer to the Colossians is saying that whatever is essential to God's "God-ness" is there in Jesus.  Even though Jesus doesn't do a lot of the things we expect a respectable deity to do.  Not once does Jesus zap a sinner.  Not once does Jesus protect his reputation, his glory, or his sense of "greatness."  Not once does Jesus feel the need to tell anybody else how smart, how well-learned, how powerful, or how well-liked he is.  Like Margaret Thatcher's famous line about being a lady of class and nobility, "If you have to tell people you are one, you aren't."  

Jesus doesn't call down lightning from heaven or summon up an angelic army to intimidate his opponents. And yet, the writer of Colossians dares to say that the brown-skinned face of this homeless Palestinian peasant living under the boot of a foreign empire, the face of Yeshua Bar Yusef, as he would have been called, bears the very fullness of the face of God... the same divine face that Moses himself couldn't look at or else he would be destroyed.

What a claim.  The essence of God isn't in the pyrotechnics or the firepower, any more than the Wizard wasn't really in the booming voice and ominous spectacle in the Emerald City.  The God-ness of God, the New Testament says, is really there in the person of Jesus... so that if you've seen Jesus, you haven't missed out on anything core to who God is.

That might just mean that a lot of the assumptions we make about what makes God "God" need to be re-examined.  Maybe we'll see that the right definition of God isn't simply, "the biggest power with the biggest arsenal in the universe" but rather "the Love that lays itself down for the sake of the beloved."

So here's the deal, friends: you and I are invited to come face to face with the very fullness of God, not by going to the right church building in the right holy place, and not by observing some immense display of destructive power, but by the exchange from one human face to another of the love that will not let us go. 

You shouldn't trust me to summarize the latest Star Wars movie, or even to remember the shifting names of the villains from the Galactic Empire to the First Order to the Final Order.  But Colossians says you really can get the fullness of the deity--the "God-ness" of God--from the face of Jesus. Every other empire, every other superpower, every other ruler and authority in the dustbin of history will crumble to ruins.  But what will last is the Love who went to a cross for us, the Love who bears the fullness of God and who wears a human face.

Now, what is worth spending this day on, knowing where we can find the fullness of God?

Lord Jesus, bring the fullness of God into the empty spaces of our hearts we have kept ready for you.