Monthly Archives: March 2015

Hypostatic Union: Undercover God (Hebrews 2:14-18)

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We’re used to seeing an enormous separation between the wealthy CEO and the workers beneath him.  Which may be partly why the TV series Undercover Boss has been hailed as “emotionally stirring” and “an hour of feel-good television for underappreciated workers.”  The “reality” show’s premise is simple enough: find a company, take the CEO, and make the CEO work one or more of the lower-level jobs and rub elbows with the “common worker.”  For example, in one episode, David Kim goes undercover in the kitchen of one of his corporately-owned Baja Fresh restaurants.  The results are both amusing (to see the boss try and tackle menial tasks) and humanizing (to hear the story of real workers).

As we’ve noted before, today’s world is no longer asking: Should I believe in Jesus or not?  Today’s world is asking: What kind of Jesus should I believe in?  But if Jesus truly existed, then we might phrase the question a bit differently: Who or what was Jesus?  What kind of person was he?  How does he help us understand who God is?

The early church reached a staggering conclusion about Jesus: that he was God in the flesh.  The word they chose to use was the incarnation.  Living in Texas, I developed a fondness for Tex-Mex cuisine.  When teaching on this subject to a group of local college students, we found common ground in the phrase salsa con carne—literally “salsa with meat.”  So the incarnation was like that—God with meat.  In Jesus, God put on skin and bone.  He became sort of the “undercover boss,” the CEO of the universe rubbing elbows with us mere mortals.

We find this idea embedded in the pages of Hebrews:

14 Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, 15 and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. 16 For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. 17 Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. 18 For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.” (Hebrews 2:14-18)

The author makes this perfectly clear.  Jesus is God.  Jesus is also man.  But how can we possibly put these two things together?

The early church offered an answer that was as simple as it was mysterious.  They called it the hypostatic union.  What does this mouthful mean?  It means that Jesus—in taking on human form—possessed two unique sets of attributes.  He was fully God, in the sense that he was infinitely worthy of admiration and praise.  But he was also fully man, in the sense that he would experience everything you and I would ever experience.  Hunger.  Thirst.  Embarrassment.  Puberty.  Temptation.  Pain. Tears.  Death.

Though the church had (largely) worshipped Christ in this way for years, these ideas became codified in 451 at the Council of Chalcedon.  There, the church described Jesus as “complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man….not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same…”

Chris Wiles, "Logos," Oil crayon on paper, 2007.

Chris Wiles, “Logos,” Oil crayon on paper, 2007.

It’s mysterious, really.  Which is why I chose to represent the idea through art (many people forget my studio art background).  The work that you see is an oil pastel piece simply titled Logos, John’s favored word to describe God becoming man (John 1:1-18).  The two blood vessels represent Christ’s two natures.  The blue represents Christ’s God-nature; the red his humanity—colors that were actually quite common in early Christian art to represent Christ’s divinity (blue for heaven) and humanity (red for blood) respectively.  The artery extending and illuminating the scathed darkness represents Christ’s coming into the world through his human birth and life—the fact that it extends from right to left is reflective of his Hebrew origins.  And the intertwining of the blood vessels might also be said to represent the Greek letter chi, the first letter of the word Christ, the Greek word for the Hebrew Messiah  meaning “king” (ancient icons used to depict Jesus holding up two crossed fingers for the same reason—as the crossing of the fingers resembled a chi and the position of his hand would resemble a rho, the second letter of Christ).

But why would such a union even be necessary?  Why would Jesus have come to earth as both man and God?  In the last century, a German writer named Jurgen Moltmann has convincingly argued that the incarnation of Jesus was both necessary and fortuitous—meaning it has great benefit for us.

NECESSARY INCARNATION

In the middle ages, a writer named Anselem worked hard to understand this very concept.  He ended up writing a book called Cur Deus Homo, meaning “Why the God-Man?”  His conclusions were a bit colored by medieval economics, but they still are helpful.

See, according to Anselem, man finds himself in a quandary.  Man sinned in the Garden of Eden, causing damage to God’s character.  Man must work to repair this damage.  But wait, because God is infinite, the damage cannot be repaired.

Think of it this way: you’re traveling down the streets of present-day Detroit.  You lose control of the car.  You swerve to your left and crash into a lot of used Ford cars and damage a sedan.  How much is your debt?  It’s simple: just look at the sticker price, or consult Kelly Blue Book.  But what if you swerve to your right and crash into the Henry Ford Museum, totaling one of the few remaining Model-T Fords?  How much is your debt?  The truth is, that item was a part of history.  We might say it’s “priceless.”

So too is the character of God.  So infinite is God’s character that there is no price we can pay to repair the damage.

So God became man.  Why?  First, only an infinite price can satisfy man’s debt.  And only God is infinite.  So God had to be sacrificed.  But second, only man can pay this debt, because man was the one who caused the damage.  So God became a human being.  Do you see the necessity now?  God became man so that a man could make an infinite sacrifice to pay man’s debt.

FORTUITOUS INCARNATION

But Moltmann also insists that the incarnation of Jesus was “fortuitous”—it offers us great benefit.  Why?  Because if Jesus came to earth as a human being, it shows us a new and better way to be human.  And if Jesus experienced every temptation, every stinging rejection, every hangnail, every family crisis, every loss, every tragedy that you and I experience, it changes everything we know about God.  In Harper Lee’s now-classic To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch sits down with his daughter to talk to her about how to approach people who seem different.  “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view,” he says, “You’ve got to put on his skin, and walk around in it.”  Jesus put on your skin and walked around in it.

In the era of WWII, Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat in a prison cell—guilty of defying the Nazis—and wrote this about Jesus:

“God lets himself be pushed out of the world on the cross.  He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which He is with us and helps us…The Bible directs us to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.”  (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison)

In Jesus, we have a suffering God at our side.  Why is this helpful?  If you’ve ever been through a tragedy, then you know that one of the worst things someone can say to you is “I understand.”

Because usually they don’t.

Jesus Christ is the only person who can sit by you, put his arm around your shoulder and tell us, “I understand.”  At the cross we find solidarity with a God who puts up with outcasts and absorbs the debt and guilt of all mankind.  And standing at the empty tomb we find hope in a God who promises that evil and pain will never have the final word.  Flowers will one day bloom where now there exist only thorns.  And for now—for always—we have a God of love.  An incarnational God.  A God who draws near.

 

What’s Old is New (Hebrews 2:5-13)

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I have remarkably few enemies.  Yet there is one in particular that I’d like to introduce you to today.  Her name is Kate Turabian.  If you or your kids have been around school at any time in recent history, you know the name not for the person, but for the classic “Kate Turabian” style of formatting.  This means that everything you write not only has to match the “Turabian” style in both font and spacing, but headings and subheadings require a set number of spaces.  Your citations have to be carefully footnoted in the exactly proper form.  The white edges on the sides of your papers have to be a certain width.  And if you’re a student, you know the perplexing sting of learning you lost points on a paper because—and I’m not exaggerating—your hyphens were too wide.

Turabian.  The name has become synonymous with an environment of strict standards and rigorous literalism.  So it’s actually a bit exasperating to open the book of Hebrews to see the way the author often plays fast and loose with the way he haphazardly quotes Old Testament texts—with no citations, mind you.  It’s no wonder the author remained unnamed—who’d want their graders to see how sloppy this sermon is?

What’s the author doing, exactly?  The author of Hebrews is demonstrating something fundamental about the Christian Bible: that no Scripture is complete until it is understood in light of Jesus.  This doesn’t mean that the Bible is open to being interpreted and re-interpreted, but it does mean that we understand the Bible only when we learn to see Jesus on every page.  So in Hebrews 2:5-13, we see the author of Hebrews using a series of Old Testament quotations to explain just how awesome Jesus truly is.  Let’s look at this text with the citations supplied (by me) in bold:

5 For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking. 6 It has been testified somewhere,

“What is man, that you are mindful of him,

or the son of man, that you care for him?
7 You made him for a little while lower than the angels;
you have crowned him with glory and honor,
8     putting everything in subjection under his feet.” [PSALM 8:4-6]

 Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. 9 But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.

10 For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering. 11 For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers, 12 saying,

“I will tell of your name to my brothers;

in the midst of the congregation I will sing your praise.” [PSALM 22:22]

13 And again,

“I will put my trust in him.” [Psalm 18:2]

And again,

“Behold, I and the children God has given me.” [ISAIAH 8:18]

 In today’s world, it’s tempting to select certain “favorite” verses or passages and make them something of a “life verse.”  There’s certainly nothing wrong with having a few favorite passages, but the author here is saying that the Bible must be read as a continual story of God working in the world.  One author writes:

 “…the author [reads] non-narrative texts against the backdrop of the narrative of salvation history.  He ‘narrativized’ material from Psalms and Proverbs, sometimes taking them as scripts on the lips of Christ or as prophetic words of God in relation to events in the new covenant.  Words in non-narrative genres are read as words within the overarching narrative of salvation history.” (Ken Schenck, “God has Spoken,” in The Epistle to the Hebrews and Christian Theology, p. 324)

This is why the division between “Old Testament” and “New Testament” is somewhat misleading.  The division came in the early centuries of the church, when a man named Jerome noted the contrast between the “old covenant” described by the prophets and the “new covenant” described by Jesus and his followers (the book of Hebrews will later make fuller explanation of this difference).  So, he concluded, we should call the earlier scriptures the “Old Testament,” and the writings featuring Jesus and his followers the “New Testament.”  But really, we need to recognize that the kinds of quotations we find in Hebrews aren’t that unusual.  In his commentary on the Bible, A.E. Hill estimates that about 32 percent—yes, a third—of the New Testament is composed of quotations from the Old Testament (!).  That’s a lot.  And it highlights the way that the Bible is meant to be one unified story.

This also helps us understand how the Bible differs from other ancient and other religious writings.  Even now we’re seeing some friction (to put it mildly) between Western cultures and the nature of Islam.  Two articles from The Atlantic magazine (both in the last month or so) have been particularly telling.  In the first, called “What ISIS Really Wants,” Graeme Wood highlights the deep connection of Islamic beliefs and the recent escalation of violence.  In a counter-article, called “The Phony Islam of ISIS,” Caner K. Dagli notes the ways that ISIS has really just hijacked religious language—the Quran, after all, is a starting point, and must be coupled with other writings such as the Hadith (the sayings of Muhammad).  The result is a confusing web.  We needn’t get stuck in the details of this, only to note that when a religious text is intended only to reflect a person’s experiences, we are left only with questions of interpretation.   Does Islam promote violence?  Or peace?  Even these questions are partially obscured by the Muslim doctrine of “abrogation,” where certain texts are thought to “replace” pre-existing ones (!).

The Christian Bible is radically different.  Yes, there are passages that generate confusion.  Yes, there have been passages used (inappropriately) to justify violence and oppression.  But the overarching story—the one the writer of Hebrews bids us to lose ourselves in—is one of salvation and redemption, a promise fulfilled in the arrival of Jesus.

But what about you and me?  Sometimes it’s easy to flounder in our Bible reading because, well, we’re separated from the original culture by a few centuries or more.  There’s a book on my shelf called The Hermeneutical Spiral.  It’s one of those books you only read once, but the author’s central image is extraordinarily helpful.  Grant Osborne (the author) suggests that when we read and interpret a part of the Bible, we’re really sort of drawing circles around it.  The more we read, the more we interpret, the more our circles will spiral closer and closer toward the center—that is, toward the exact meaning.  We may start of spinning in circles around a particular text, but with time, with experience, with community, we draw closer and closer toward the truth.  This is partly why attending a Sunday morning worship service is so spiritually vital—because it is there that we grow in our understanding of God’s word as we hear it unfolded and explained.  This is partly why a mid-week community group is important—because it is there that we see how God’s word impacts the everyday lives of those with whom we share life.  Everyone loves a good story.  And the Bible is the greatest of all.