‘God is Love’ Series: Love Became Flesh
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for
God is love.
God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.
1 John 4:7-9
"Their god is a corpse nailed to a tree." This quote, from the movie The Northman, was given by a Nordic soldier in his accusation that Christian slaves were responsible for the recent murders occurring in the village. While the Christians were not at fault, the soldier's accusation reveals a deep truth about our faith: on the surface, it is senseless. The movie is new as of this year, but for the last few years, I've been wrestling with this idea of our God being nailed to a piece of wood used by the Roman Empire to execute treasonous criminals. There have been times this degrading accusation has led my faith to despair. However, the more I've befriended its ludicrous and mind-warping implications the more I've fallen in love with Jesus.
The quote was meant to be offensive and dismissive of the Christian faith, but the soldier's honest bewilderment of a people willing to worship a God who not only became human but a God who willingly died the death of a criminal is the same bewilderment that, ultimately, saved my faith. To be clear, a movie or a soundbite did not save my faith, but rather, it was my scandalous exploration into the impossible idea of God's death that did so. My last post, "Losing God, Finding Jesus," went into detail about my complicated history and relationship with Christianity. It was my confession of idolizing a god no bigger than my deepest fears and loneliness. This post is about finding Jesus. It is my profession that the Gospel is still good news and powerful enough to restore hope to a world beaten and battered by injustice, suffering, and nihilism. It is my profession that the Gospel, at its core, is the universal declaration that, in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, Love became flesh.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.
All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it … The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us,
and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth … No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
The Gospel of John, Chapter 1
Christians believe that Jesus, who John identifies as the "Word," is God, and as such, there has never been a time when Jesus Christ was not God. Of course, this creates one heck of a math problem as to how God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit can, at the same time, all be God. For some, the irrationality of such a contradictory claim is enough for many to reject Christian doctrine and practice all together, and to be honest, I don't have many answers to offer them. 1+1+1=1 doesn't add up, literally. However, my interest in foregrounding the Trinity in my understanding of the Gospel is not so I can resolve the mystery of God's nature, but rather, so I can, hopefully, articulate its salvific relevance and importance.
According to Christian teaching, Jesus reveals that God is and has always been Love. God as Trinity is the revelation that God's own nature is oneness through difference, individuality through community, and unity through multiplicity. This is to say that God is not to be found or understood in terms of normativity, conformity, or uniformity. On the contrary, God's very life, as found in the eternal giving and receiving of Love between Father, Son, and Spirit, is found in the generative power of diversity, relationship, and cooperation. Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of every flower whose life is renewed by a journeying bee, of every deep root that drinks life from a Spring rain, of every deep breath whose sustenance comes from the waste of an Oak tree, of every beach tide being pulled by the moon, of every crying baby needing milk it did not produce. I could go on, but I think you get the point: Life is relationship. It is Love. God, the Word who became flesh, created the world so unnecessarily beautiful and diverse because God, too, is extravagantly beautiful and diverse. In other words, the art is always a reflection of the imagination, nature, and desires of the Artist.
For many Christians, the claim that "all things came into being through [Christ]" isn't hard to accept. We can accept that nature is beautiful because God is beautiful. However, we seem to stop short of acknowledging that, just as nature reveals the grandeur and glory of God, Christ reveals the life and character of God. For instance, many Christians I know have no issue positing the Trinity as a completely logical doctrine to believe in while ignoring the example of Christ as a divine way of life. I would even argue that much of Christian practice is ethically heretical, as we tend to live as if God and Jesus are not the same. Our lives and witness treat Jesus as some footnote in the Christian story, as if to be saved meant marketing ourselves as good people rather than planting our feet along the path of his Passion.
If the Gospel is truly about our saving, then it must be about our healing. For this reason, I'm skeptical of any articulation of the Gospel that reduces it down to a marketing scheme we can print on pieces of paper to hand out at Walmart or post on a ten-slide PowerPoint. If the Gospel is salvific, then our healing, our restoration, and our eternal journey of sharing in Christ's divinity are to be the foundation upon which our faith is defined and shared. In the words of St. Athanasius (c. 295-373), "For he was incarnate that we might be made god; and he manifested himself through a body that we might receive an idea of the invisible Father; and he endured the insults of human beings, that we might inherit incorruptability." God became flesh not in order to discard that flesh in favor of transferring salvation to a time after death but so that God could liberate flesh, here and now, to be what it was always intended to be from the beginning.
Jesus Christ is liberated flesh. He is healed humanity. And it is in our union, our openness to allow his life and image to become our own, that we are saved. St. Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 330-390) explains it like this, "The unassumed is the unhealed, but what is united with God is also being saved. Had half of Adam fallen, what was assumed and is being saved would have been half too; but if the whole fell he is united to the whole of what was born and is being saved wholly." He who was without sin, meaning He who only knew and acted out of Love, united with fallen flesh so that we could be transformed. In other words, the incarnation enfolds us and all creation into the life of God for which we are always intended to live and thrive. The Gospel is the good news that God's life, heart, and desires have been revealed to us such that we are invited to share and participate in them. It is within this framework that I understand salvation. In this way, our saving Gospel is not a pitch or a prayer but rather, a way of life and a consciousness. Simply, the Gospel is the divine logic by which we are instructed, empowered, and transformed into the fullness and wholeness of our human nature, which Christ embodied.
For me, the linchpin is found in the Gospel of John's presentation of the Word. In the original Greek, the word that is used is Logos, which is the same Greek root for the word "logic." So another way of reading John 1 is to say that the logic of God became flesh and lived among us. Further, we can say that the logic of the Creator became flesh, revealing to us the ways and patterns of life by which we learn to live in harmony with God and the rest of creation. Christ reveals that Love is the logic of the universe. He reveals that Love is Reality and in order to live, truly live, we must make his consciousness, his ways, his cross our own.
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.
Philippians 2:5-8
Thus, salvation is not about "accepting" Jesus as if he were a friend request on Facebook. Nor is salvation some family heirloom that one receives simply because they are related to someone who follows Christ. Rather, salvation is the process by which we are transformed and healed into the likeness of Christ through the "renewing of our mind" as we continuously make the logic of Christ our own (Romans 12:2). Just as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:16, "we have the mind of Christ." If a Christian is anything, it is one who begins to see the world, others, and themselves through the eyes and mind of Christ. Jesus is the light of the world, and consequently, it is by and through Christ that we come to see the world clearly and inhabit the world harmoniously.
To be clear, seeing the world and others through the eyes and mind of our Creator is to finally see that there is no divide between the sacred and the secular. It is learning to see Christ in every inch and moment of our lives. It is to see that all of life is grace, and it is beautiful. The Gospel is the good news that God has already deemed us and creation good and worthy and beloved. Consequently, the "saved" person is the one who is simply living and breathing in cooperation with Life itself, with Love himself, by treating others and creation as the divine gifts they are. This is to say that salvation and the sacred cannot be found in a box or within the four walls of a church. It can only be found in the heart made alive by God's own heart, that heartbeat animating all of Life.
Christ is the second Adam. He reminds us that we were created to be human beings. Nothing more and nothing less. In a broken world, we have found all sorts of ways to forfeit our humanity by dehumanizing others. Yet, God became flesh to take us back home to the lost depths of our own souls where we feel safe enough to open our hearts, extend our arms, and care for our neighbors. Christ reminds us that the Gospel is not something outside of us, waiting to be found, bought, or seized. Christ reveals the Gospel as the very Light that created us "in the beginning" and illuminates our hearts now. He is the proof that God never wanted to stop walking with us in the cool of the day; never wanted to stop clothing us in love; never wanted to stop gifting us a life of abundant beauty. It is in Adam that we lost our way to fear, violence, and division, but it is in Christ that we are being remade into the likeness of the Perfect Human Being, the One who has shown us that God is love, gentleness, kindness, vulnerability, mutuality, and friendship.
Of course, not everyone is particularly fond of a Gospel of Love. Love is always foolishness to those who don't believe, including some Christians. John warns us that although the "world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him." Same as it always was, Jesus isn't of much use for those who wish to establish their sense of identity and self-worth belittling, demeaning, or hurting others. And further still, the life that Jesus of Nazareth led is hardly considered the "American Dream," or even the "good life" by most people's accounts. He didn't have wealth or status. He didn't possess political, economic, or military power. Yet, the power he did reveal, the power of Love, was enough to threaten the entrenched powers of this world. People will continue to see the Son of God as some "corpse nailed to a tree." But my testimony is this: the teachings, life, and logic of Christ have been to the darkest and coldest parts of my soul and left there nothing but love, healing, and freedom. This is my invitation to you. Not that you will accept Jesus from the comfort of your established life, but rather, that you will follow him until your heart is rightside-up.
The Gospel, and all of creation for that matter, is fundamentally and fully about Love. It is God's message to us that we came from God, were made for God, and to God we shall return, which is also to say that we came from Love, were made for Love, and to Love shall we return. Friends, the Gospel is quite literally good news, and there is no better news in the world than knowing that Love became flesh so that we may become Love.