The angels gathered around to hear the conversation between the Father, Son and Spirit. The word was that a special mission was about to take place, a mission that would affect every last particle of dust in the Creator’s far-flung universe. What fantastic plan did He have up His celestial sleeve? His face was pained. The angels had not seen such agony since that cursed decision in the Garden. The Father spoke: “My Son,” he said. “Our world that we have created is in terrible shape. There is hatred, violence, bloodshed, loneliness, poverty, fear, greed and despair. We have grieved to our depths over this. But the time has come to implement our plan, the plan our love hatched before we created the world. The time has come for you to go into our creation. But as we planned, you will go unannounced. You will assume the flesh we fashioned for our creation. You will be born in a small, insignificant part of the world, raised in a backwater village. You will not go to the political or economic power centers. Rather, gather around you a small group of uneducated fishermen, and spend time being with them, telling them about us. Never doubt my love for you, but remember that one ounce of Truth is more powerful than all the combined mass of the Universe. When the time is right, you are to go into a town called Jerusalem, where you will be publicly rejected. You will be arrested, beaten, humiliated, and flogged. And then your body will be nailed naked onto a cross, and you will be exposed as a rejected fool for all the world to see. And then you will go the way of the world into death’s silence. But our love is stronger than death. For in three days, I will bring you back. And then you will return to me, still bearing the marks and the imprint of humanity, and we will finish our work through those uneducated fishermen and restore humanity to us.”
Cut!
Wait a minute. Doesn’t this sound impossible? If God were to come to this earth, would he choose this way? Would he come in the form of a lowly country carpenter from a tiny, nowhere village? Would he skirt the political process, forego the powers that shape our world, and start with a miserable group of fishermen, prostitutes and outcasts? Would he go to his death in the most humiliating public execution ever invented? Would he, at every turn, take the most humiliating, lowly approach?
In some ways, this sounds absurd. Many, in fact, think it’s too hard to believe. God as a carpenter? God on a cross? And what has happened since the time of Jesus? People are still evil, and this world is still a bad place. There is still hatred, violence, bloodshed, loneliness, poverty, fear, greed, and despair. If God were to come, wouldn’t all this change? Wouldn’t things be different?
But it is this intersection between the impossible and the possibilities of forgiveness, between the reality of evil and the absurdity of love, between mankind’s massive foul-up and Divinity’s humiliating mercy, that marks the essence of Jesus.
WHAT KIND OF GOD DO YOU NOT BELIEVE IN?
In Jesus, we see that God refuses to force himself on anyone. Rather, how does God work? When God decided to rescue this world from itself, when God decided to begin making things right, He refused to override our freedom. He refused to act in a way that did not have all the earmarks of love, His essential character trait. So how does God work? He comes to us in the most humble, unobtrusive, approachable manner possible. He comes in the form of the lowly country carpenter, born into relative poverty in a backwater village. He comes as one who had the legitimacy of his birth questioned. He comes as one to whom anyone, at anytime, anywhere, can relate, because he is on our level. He comes as one who is with us.
Why did God choose this way? Because he wants every human to have the choice to decide for or against him. And here’s the kicker: what type of God do we get to choose from? God has put forward for us to see Jesus as the God about whom we should decide, for Jesus reveals the essence of God.
The preacher and teacher George Buttrick used to tell the story of his students coming to him and saying “You know, I just don’t believe in God.” And Buttrick would respond “What kind of God do you not believe in. I might not believe in him either.” And then Buttrick would tell them about Jesus. Jesus is the exact expression of all that God is. As Brennan Manning writes, “The question is no longer is Jesus God-like; but is God Jesus-like? We cannot deduce anything about Jesus from what we think we know about God; we must now deduce everything about God from what we know about Jesus.”[1]
WHAT IS YOUR IMAGE OF GOD?
What is your image when you think of God? For most of us, God is “something up there where humans are not.” But that “something up there” kind of God is not the God of the Bible. As theologian Karl Barth put it, there is no “humanlessness in God” because God irrevocably bound himself to humanity from the very beginning, from before time. The revelation of this bond, this covenant of love, is perfectly displayed in Jesus Christ, God with us. “To put it in the simplest way, what unites God and us humans is that He does not will to be God without us, that He does not allow His history to be His and ours ours, but causes them to take place as a common history. That is the special truth which the Christian message has to proclaim at its very heart.”[2]
Jesus is God’s way of entering the human story and giving us the freedom to choose and the power to love. We are not puppets in God’s universe; we are free, responsible people, made for love. And it is precisely this love that requires our freedom to choose. As Frederick Buechner writes, “Part of an author’s genius, which one might say is also part of God’s genius, is never to manipulate his people like puppets to be what he wants them to be but to leave them continually free to become whatever they have it in them to become in the world he has created for them so that they may rise out of his creating heart and spirit with their own rich measure of his truth the way you and I rise out of God’s heart and become forever part of it.”[3]
EMMANUEL
This, at last, is the “With us God,” Emmanuel. The God who knows every hair on our head, who knows every detail of our lives, the God who is constantly with us. “What makes God so clear to us is not so much His big blessings to us, but the tiny things, because they show His amazing intimacy with us-He knows every detail of each of our individual lives.”[4]
I like that kind of God. I want a God who is “with us” in every detail. I don’t want any other kind of God. Something in me says God must be like that, or else God would not be “God.” “I can’t get Jesus Christ out of my mind. If I dismiss him as a person, he haunts me as an idea.”[5] Maybe we want that kind of God because God created us to be with him, to be in relationship with him, and we won’t find ourselves until we do.
But if God were to really be with us, then he must be with us in every way. There is no use in saying he feels our pain unless he has felt our pain. To be with us, he must somehow feel the sting of death and betrayal and lost love and ridicule and loneliness. He must enter the sweat and tears and crying and stoop down. We want, and need, not only the Mighty Warrior God, triumphing over evil, but we need the Merciful and Gracious God, forgiving our evil. We need the Transcendent and the Intimate. “When we listen for the call of the Beyond, we listen with the silent and secret hope that the call comes from within as well as without. We want the Beyond and the Intimate to meet each other in the depths of our own person. The testimony of…Emmanuel—meaning “God with us”—is that they do.”[6]
If you are wondering about God, whether or not to believe in Him, whether he fits within your system of justice, please look at Jesus. In Jesus, God has taken away every excuse we have to believe or not to believe in God. In Jesus, we have a God who comes to us, who sweats with us, who prays the prayers of God-forsaken aloneness that we feel. In Jesus, maybe more than anything else, we see that we have a God who is with us in everything that we experience.
The last recorded words of Jesus still ring true: “I am with you always, even to the end of time.”
[1] Brennan Manning, Ruthless Trust (New York: Harper Collins, 2002) 88.
[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 (London: T&T Clark, 1956) 7.
[3] Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark (New York: Harper One, 2006), 166.
[4] Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (Grand Rapids, MI: Discovery House, 1963), 155.
[5] Earl F. Palmer, The 24 Hour Christian (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1987), 25.
[6] Ted Peters, God–The World’s Future (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 89.