Reflections on the Incarnate Christ
By: Saundra L. Washington
Most people would agree that the New Testament makes two astounding claims about Jesus. To some, the claims cancel each other out. To others, they appear utterly absurd. But, seemingly, to the vast majority of Christians down through the ages, it has seemed necessary to insist upon both affirmations.
Personally, I believe that Jesus Christ is both God and Man; human and divine. He shows us who God is and He shows us what we ought to be. In Biblical terminology, “in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col. 2:9, RSV), and yet he is one who “in every respect has been tempted as we are” (Heb. 4:15, RSV).
I think we encounter a lot of difficulty when we attempt to make one of these affirmations without the other. Many will acknowledge that Jesus was an “exceptionally good man” but reject the idea that He is divine.
Conversely, there are those who assert emphatically that because Jesus was divine, He was omniscient and omnipotent and therefore, did not experience the human condition in the same way as we do. They seem irritated if it is suggested that Jesus grew weary, hungered and became discouraged and lonely like all human beings, even though these facts are Biblically documented.
It seems to me that both camps miss the point of the New Testament. Take the opening verses of the fourth Gospel, for example. The author has been talking about the “Word” of God, which in the Old Testament was a way of describing the power and creativity of God: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made.” (Ps. 33:6). God’s “Word” is His creative energy; the means by which He enters into relationship with man and reveals to us who He is. The Gospel of John states: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (1:14). To me “became flesh” means simply that Christ became a human being like us. It is here that we see the showing forth of God’s creative power, in a flesh and blood human life. God is not just pretending to be human. He has become one of us, in a man who was called Jesus Bar-Joseph, son of a Nazareth carpenter. When Jesus got hungry, it was real hunger and in the same sense as we know hunger. It was not merely something similar. When nails were driven into His body, it caused Jesus to suffer excruciating pain, and real blood flowed from His wounds.
The astonishing and magnificent claim which the New Testament dares to assert is that in the life and the teaching, the death and the resurrection, of this man Jesus, God Himself was present in a unique way, so that if we want to see clearly who God is and what He has done, we must look at this same Jesus called the Christ.
Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, `Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. (Jn 14:9-10).
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