Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre, Bury & Whitefield service (dated 6th February 2022), continuing our current series on the Apostles’ Creed. You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel.
DIVINE COLOURS
Over the past few weeks we’ve been travelling through the Apostles’ Creed, using it as a guide for exploring what has been passed onto us.
So far, we have talked about our belief in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth. Within those few simple words—words that the creed borrows from the scriptures, words saturated with story and experience—we have managed to say a great deal about God.
However, we have not said everything. We’ve certainly not said everything about God, and we’ve certainly not said everything about this memory that Christians have passed on.
In a way, what we have so far is a set of colours: pots of vibrant divine paint called Father, Almighty, and Creator (they may seem like strange names for colours, but check out the colour charts for paint in your local B&Q, and they’ll seem pretty tame by comparison). It is possible to take those “colours”, combine them in various ways, and paint for ourselves any number of versions of ‘God’.
So the creed doesn’t stop here. It continues, ‘And in Jesus Christ, God’s only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, Born of the Virgin Mary…’
As an aside: depending upon which version of the Apostles’ Creed you read, this section of the creed may begin ‘I believe in…’, and sometimes it simply begins ‘And in…’. Personally, I prefer the latter. The use of ‘and’ intimately ties this second statement to the first, reminding us that Father, Almighty and Maker remains an incomplete definition: ‘and’ recalls that we are still mid-sentence. In other words, these statements are not two separate confessions regarding God, but one long breathy confession. The God we know as Father, Almighty and Maker, is eternally tethered to the knowledge of the Son (as Jesus intimates in Matthew 11:27). Adopting ‘and’ also reflects the sentiments and syntax of the creedal confessions of the New Testament (For examples, see: Romans 1:7; 1 Corinthians 1:3; 2 Corinthians 1:2; Ephesians 1:2; Philippians 1:2; Galatians 1:1; 1 Thessalonians 1:1, 3:11, 3:13; 2 Thessalonians 1:2, 2:16; 1 Timothy 1:1, 5:21; James 1:1; 1 John 1: 4; 2 John 3, Jude 1-2).
There is an extraordinary amount of things said in this particular fragment of the creed.
Sadly, we only have time to dip our toes into these words, this morning. But, in dipping our toes, we should understand that at the centre of the Christian confession is a name—a person. Not a philosophy or a set of abstract ideas and beliefs. But an actual, concrete person—Jesus Christ, God’s Son, our Lord.
It is this person, and only this person, who displays exactly how all these ‘divine colours’ come together. Jesus defines God for us, and every other definition must bow before him.
As St. John writes it, in the opening of his Gospel, ‘No one has ever seen God. [But the one and only Son], who is near to the Father’s heart. He has revealed God to us.’ (NLT, using footnotes)
Or, as per The Message translation, ‘No one has ever seen God, not so much as a glimpse. This one-of-a-kind God-Expression, who exists at the very heart of the Father, has made him plain as day.’
Or, as theologian, Kathryn Tanner beautifully puts it, ‘Christ clarifies and specifies the nature, aim, and trustworthiness of all God’s dealings with [humanity] because Christ is where those dealings with [humanity] come to ultimate fruition … Christ epitomizes [embodies] in supreme form God’s overall intent with respect to us; and thereby gives that intent a concrete shape we can follow [as disciples]. The whole of who God is for us as creator and redeemer, which in its varied complexity mighty simply overwhelm and mystify us, is found in concentrated compass [scope] in Christ.’[i]
This morning, we’re going to spend some time pondering this marvel known as The Incarnation. And so, if you a have a Bible to hand, we are going to read a few verses from the beginning of the book of Hebrews.
READ: HEBREWS 1:1-3 (NLT)
THE CHARACTER OF GOD’S SPEECH
God speaks. And it is a good job that God does, because, let’s be honest, God is big, complex and mysterious. We need help grasping what God is like.
Now sure, we can look at the universe around us and claim that there is a God. As we explore the magnificence and scale of creation, as we view the enormity of the universe, and consider the sublime intricacy of a single human cell, and delve into the amazing sophistication of atom’s nucleus, it all inspires awe and wonder, and curiosity.
As the Psalmist writes, ‘The heavens proclaim the glory of God.’ (Psalm 19:1, NLT). Creation speaks, wordlessly, of its creator.
As Christians, we certainly do not neglect that and we shouldn’t forget that. For example, whenever I observe and hear the crashing of ocean waves, something within me bows to the awesomeness of God, and I worship. Whenever chocolate melts in my mouth, thankfulness erupts within me and I worship (with a mouthful of chocolate).
If you hear me saying, ‘On nom nommmmm …’, whilst eating chocolate, you should be translating it as, ‘How great thou art!’
And yet, the world and all in contains are not enough, and they have never been the only things to speak of God. God has never left it to us, as humans, to somehow figure God out and then find God out of our own action and ingenuity. Whenever we do this, it often leads to idols and self-righteous attitudes. Grace has always existed: God has always approached humanity.
As the writer of Hebrews points out, God speaks. ‘God has spoken many times and in many ways’, the writer says, ‘to our ancestors through the prophets.’
In other words, God sent messages. God communicated through signs, dreams, angelic visitors and prophets. As we read the stories of the Old Testament, we see the people contained in its stories grappling with these communications: sometimes they grasp them, sometimes they don’t.
However, as Christians, we believe in something much more: We believe that the Word became flesh (John 1:1-18). As the writer of Hebrews says, we believe that, ‘in these final days, [God] has spoken to us through his Son’, and that, ‘The Son radiates God’s own glory and expresses the very character of God.’
To put that another way, we believe that in Jesus Christ, God’s son, our Lord, we encounter the perfect and exact, the ultimate even, revelation of who God is. God is like Jesus.
Yes, God had spoken in the past. God had sent messages. To use an analogy of Tom Wright’s, it is as if, for a long time, God had been sending advance sketches of himself to his people, but now he’s given us his exact portrait.[ii]
Jesus is not just another message in a series of messages: all the other messages have been hinting towards this ultimate revelation. Additionally, Jesus is not just another spokesperson or another angelic messenger: He is the Divine made visible (Col 1:15).
The writer of Hebrews is declaring this.
One of the major themes of Hebrews is that the Son is greater than any angelic messenger; the revelation of the Son is more than Moses, and more than the priesthood, and more than the High Priest, and more than the sacrificial system. All these things mediated, or transmitted a shadow, a sketch, an allusion of God. But, in contrast, as the Message translation words it, ‘This Son perfectly mirrors God, and is stamped with God’s nature’.[iii]
The Son perfectly shows us the Father.
Our sons (Corban and Eaden) resemble Steph and myself, and share in some of our mannerisms; but they are not exactly like us. You can spot traces of Steph and I in them, but meeting our sons does not mean that you have met with us.
Jesus is the Son of the Father, and is the same essence. As Hebrews writes, he is the exact image. In meeting Jesus, we meet with God; not traces of God, not a resemblance of God. As Jesus himself said to one of his disciples, ‘If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.’ (John 14:9-10)
If you want to know what God looks like, look at Jesus.
THE SCANDAL OF PARTICULARITY
To confess that we believe in Jesus Christ, God’s son, is to confess that we believe in the incarnation.
What that means is (to use the words of pastor and author, Brian Zahnd, in his book, When Everything is on Fire) we believe in the ‘scandal of particularity’.[iv] We don’t just have a general and ambiguous idea of God: we confess that the pre-existent Son of God became a particular person, in a particular place, at a particular moment in the history our world, and that through this particularity, the invisible has been made perfectly visible.[v]
The uncreated became a part of creation. The Divine became human. Jesus was both God and man. And this confession has always been a ‘scandal’ and has always made people uneasy.
Very early on in church history, alternative ideas began to circulate trying to knock either the God part or the Human part out of that equation.
Two in particular stood out:
One alternative suggested that Jesus was just an everyday man, born of a woman, and that God ‘adopted’ him as his son during either his baptism, or resurrection, or ascension (a theory now known as ‘adoptianism’). It denied the pre-existence of the Son of God, the eternal deity of the Son, something that is affirmed in texts like Hebrews 1:1-3, 2:14-21; Galatians 4:4; John 1, 3:16; Philippians 2:5-11; Ephesians 1:1-14; 1 John 1:1; John 17:1-5; Colossians 1:15-22, for examples.
The other major suggestion (called ‘docetism’) proposed that Jesus was a divine being masquerading as a human being. He appeared to be human, but it was just a disguise—he wasn’t human at all, he just pretended. This theory wanted to deny that Jesus was human, like we are: that Jesus was born, that Jesus was hungry, tired, had feelings, that Jesus suffered. But the fact that the Son became human, was born human, is also explicitly affirmed in those texts that I’ve just listed (it can also be found in: 1 John 4:1-3; 2 John 7-11, as further examples).
The early church rejected both these ideas—they didn’t capture the reality they had encountered. This doesn’t mean they found the reality easy to swallow or comprehend. But the claim that is made in the New Testament writings is that Jesus is fully man, and fully God. He was not a divine human, a demi-god (like a character from Greek Mythology), and he was not a human who was made divine. Jesus was fully man, and fully God.[vi]
This is why, in the words of the creed, the next part of this statement is so vital. This Jesus we speak of was ‘conceived by the Holy Spirit, Born of the Virgin Mary.’
There is much more to these words of course, and they still baffle us—these claims rightly cause amazement and curiosity in us. We can’t get our heads around it, and maybe that is the point. Maybe we are not supposed to get our heads around it: maybe the appropriate response is to be humbled and in awe.
In essence, though, these words pass onto us the important reminder that Jesus was born of a woman: yet conceived by the Spirit. He is human: He is divine.[vii]
As someone once said it, ‘A baby has become a king thousands of times, but once and only once did a king become a baby.’[viii]
BIRTH
These words regarding birth and conception also make another remarkable statement about what has happened through Jesus.
Within the stories of the scriptures, births have always signified important happenings. God promised Abraham that he would be the father of a nation, a people that would be the bearer of God’s blessings to all the nations of the world. For that promise to become reality, the capacity to reproduce, to conceive and to birth, was essential. And yet, this promise, quite clearly in the story, is set against the backdrop of a family that struggles to conceive.
You may have noticed that the vast majority of the significant women in Israel’s history, those who were called to carry this promise forward to the next generation, were known as barren: Sarah (Abraham’s wife), Rebekah (Isaac’s wife), Rachel (Jacob’s wife), all found it impossible to conceive until God opened their wombs and allowed them to conceive naturally.
The very origins of God’s people are formed, in a sense, from God’s Spirit brooding over an abyss and bringing something out of nothing (to echo the words of Genesis 1), turning a futile place into a fruitful one.
Even great heroes, like Samson and Samuel—‘saviours’, I suppose, within Israel’s history, also had mothers who were barren (Manoah’s wife and Hannah).
And so, the theme of remarkable, if not miraculous births, is part of the norm within the tradition of Israel.
Even if we put aside the impossible conceptions, for a moment, the most important story of the whole Old Testament, the story of the Exodus, starts with a birth—a new life, that takes place against all the odds in the midst of an empire of enslavement and death.
The symbol of childbirth also frames the end of the exodus story: as Israel passes through the waters of the sea.
New life, especially new life in impossible conditions, from the biblical account, seems to be how God chooses to keep his promise alive. God chooses to bring salvation to the world through the wildernesses of the world, and doing so in a humanly impossible way.
As theologian, Marcus Borg points out, ‘this repeating theme suggests that the people of God come into existence and are sustained in their existence by the grace of God. Humanly speaking, it was impossible…’[ix]
Or, as theologian, Ben Myers summarizes it, ‘at the great turning points of history, we find a woman, pregnant, and an infant child brought into the world by the powerful promise of God… Pregnancy and childbirth are the means by which God’s promise makes its way through the crooked course of history.’[x]
It should not surprise us, then, that Jesus’ story starts with birth. We should expect it! And, in the pattern of what has happened prior, when we confess that the Son of God was born, we are proclaiming that several remarkable things have transpired:
A great turning point in history has happened.
A new beginning has come about.
A great rescue has taken place.
Once again, as always, it has come about solely by God’s grace and involvement.
And with it being a Virgin, and not a barren woman, who conceives, well, that tells us that what has happened is truly unique: this saviour, this turning point, though echoed and hinted at within the stories of the past, is totally unlike what has come before it.
What is that turning point?
Well, we’ll explore that in the coming weeks. But, in the words of Hebrews 2:14-15 (NLT):
‘Because God’s children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death. Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of death.’
Or, to summarise that with the simply words of the great J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘The birth, death and resurrection of Jesus means that one day everything sad will become untrue.’[xi]
The header image for this series comes from the The Saint John’s Bible (saintjohnsbible.org), illustration taken from the book of Genesis.
[i] Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key, Preface, p. viii. [brackets mine]
[ii] Tom Wright, Hebrews for Everyone, commentary of Hebrews 1:1-5.
[iii] Andrew Murray (the reformed minister, not the tennis player), at the end of the 19th century, in, The Holiest of All, p. 35, put it this way, ‘In the Old [Testament] everything was external and through the mediation of men. … In the New all is more directly and divine … The Son brings us into the very presence of God.’
[iv] Brian Zahnd, When Everything is on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes, The House of Love, pp. 155-157.
[v] Eugene Peterson, in his wonderful book, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (pp. 31-33), also emphasises the scandal of this particularity with it’s importance on our life as disciples, though, he does not use that term. He writes, ‘By accepting Jesus as the final and definitive revelation of God, the Christian church makes it impossible for us to make up our own customized variations of the spiritual life and get away with it… Because Jesus was born in Bethlehem, grew up in Nazareth, gathered disciples in Galilee, worshipped in synagogues, ate meals in Bethany, went to a wedding in Cana, told stories in Jericho, prayed in Gethsemane, led a parade down the Mount of Olives, taught in the Jerusalem temple, was killed on the hill Golgotha, and three days later had supper with Cleopas and his friend in Emmaus, we are not free to make up our own private spiritualties; we know too much about his life, his spirituality. The story of Jesus gives access to scores of these incidents and words, specific with places and times and names, all of them hanging together and interpenetrating, forming a coherent revelation of who God is and how [God] acts and what [God] says.’
[vi] I say was with a large degree of flexibility—maybe is would be more appropriate? As Thomas Torrance said, ‘The Word of God has taken historical form and is now never without that historical form’ (Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, p.13). This is an interesting thing ponder.
[vii] None of this clears up the questions in our minds, of course. Again, all we can do is wonder and worship. In the history of church doctrinal debates, this wonder has generated both awe-filled discussion and awful argument. If you are seeking a historical summary of this conversation, then I would recommend the chapters entitled The Mystery of the Trinity and The Person of the God-Man, in Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Volume 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition.
[viii] Anon
[ix] Marcus Borg (with N. T. Wright), The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, p. 185
[x] Ben Myers, The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism, pp. 51-53
[xi] There’s always so much more to say about the wonder of the Incarnation. If you are looking for some reading on this—reading that powerfully speaks of the significance of this—then I can recommend no better book than the 4th century classic, On the Incarnation, by St. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria. I’d also recommend that you try and obtain a copy that comes with C. S. Lewis’ insightful introduction.
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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