A Person, Not An Idea--December 27, 2022

 

A Person, Not An Idea--December 27, 2022

"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]

It really all comes down to this: if we dare to be the kind of people who take Jesus seriously, and who take seriously what Jesus shows us about God, then we are going to have to deal with the messiness of a God who really becomes a walking meat-bag like the rest of us walking meat-bags.

If that makes you squeamish, well, good--you're paying attention. But let's not pretend we aren't walking meat-bags ourselves. And at the heart of the Christian faith is the notion that God is neither embarrassed nor afraid to fully take on all the gross, messy, sometimes icky, sometimes smelly, sometimes hungry, sometimes tired reality of being a walking meat-bag like us. That's what the idea of the "Incarnation" is all about, and so, in a very real sense, that's what Christmas was all about: the entry of God in a new way that fully embraces our meat-bag existence... by becoming a part of it.

This seems really important to the letter writer, John. He 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. It seems "beneath" a respectable religion to suggest a God who really traffics in the fragile, smelly life of human meat-bags. Good thing that the God of the Scriptures has never really been all that interested in being a part of a respectable religion.

And like I say, against all of the protests of the respectable religious folks, 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. "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 by going "all the way down," so to speak, embodied in one of our lives--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, the One who comes wearing our flesh without shame, the one who does not apologize to be embodied like us.

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.