Rector's Study December 2009

From the Rector’s Study ~

“He was made man that we might be made God.” It is a statement about Jesus well-known in theological circles, enthusiastically endorsed by some, suspiciously scrutinized by others. It was written by the Bishop of the Egyptian city of Alexandria in his thesis Of the Incarnation of the Word of God.

Athanasius was bishop at a time when the Church was struggling to understand for itself some central tenets of the faith and wrestling with how to communicate these meaningfully to a skeptical world around it. Tradition holds that Athanasius is the author of the creed that bears his name, and which we find in our Book of Common Prayer beginning at page 864. One reads in the fine detail of this statement of faith the subtle distinction between what Athanasius intends to say and what he decidedly means not to say. When Athanasius claims that Jesus ‘was made man that we might be made God,’ he means exactly what he writes.

Christmas time is certainly one of the most appropriate times to consider the meaning of the Incarnation; though it is never inappropriate to appreciate this mystery. The most apparent biblical source for the Athanasian meaning is found in the Second Letter of Peter. There at 1:2-4, Peter writes

“May grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Thus, he has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust, and may become participants of the divine nature.”

“Participants of the divine nature” is the pertinent, and truly amazing, phrase here. It goes a long way to explain why God makes manifest God’s grace in the birth of the baby Jesus in Bethlehem. For Christians, it may be that having been raised up on the birth story of Jesus, we seldom if ever ponder how else God might have done whatever it is that God wanted to do with regard to us human beings. But when we consider the possibilities, we can appreciate how very unique is the phenomenon of the birth of Christ Jesus.

For instance, rather than the chosen method of incarnation, God might instead have sent down to us two more stone tablets, ten more commandments: ‘You shall tend to the spirit of the Law at least as much as to the letter; You shall love others even we you don’t necessarily like them; You shall be nice; You shall share; You shall celebrate the good things about yourself; You shall turn to me for help, but really mean it when you do so;” and etc. Any of us can imagine what God might have added to the Ten, had God chosen to go this route. And any of us can imagine how people over time would have domesticated these, as happened with the first Ten.

God might have sent a prophet or multiple prophets with symbolic and allegorical language to challenge us, chastise us, and, hopefully, to encourage us. We would be looking to the fulfillment of these prophetic images and words, trying to discern them here and there, and wondering if we have yet guessed correctly. And whenever we realized that our guesses were wrong, we would return to wondering how much longer we would have to wait, and if perhaps God had given up on us and simply gone away.

If you and I were not already familiar with the idea of the incarnation, I dare say we would never imagine it ourselves. The incarnation, being God in person come to us in flesh and blood humanity, is a novel idea, truly a godly one. This is what God does in Jesus.

Further, Jesus does not just suddenly show up, all grown up, wise and leaderly. Jesus is truly incarnate, fully, so that he begins humanly as does anyone else among us, as do you and I. He is born a helpless baby. Further still, he is born to peasantry, not royalty; into a people oppressed, not free. He will know what it is to be cold, to be hungry, to be homeless, to be afraid, to be lonely. In the incarnation God is humanized, and fully so; God participates in humanity.

This is what Athanasius means when he writes that “He was made man.” And because God became human, humanity does not need any longer to try to lift itself to that state of being that is beyond our nature, namely: perfection. Yes, we can be aware of the wrongs we do, that are done to us by others. Yes, we can theorize how the errors of human society and civilization might yet be corrected. But however aware we become, we find that we are inherently incapable of ourselves to improve beyond relapse.

In the incarnation, God tells us, reminds us, that self-perfection is not our job. By the glory and goodness of God in Jesus the Incarnation, God offers to do for you, me, and for all humanity what we cannot do for ourselves or for one another. By God’s own participation in human nature, we may now participate in the nature of God. God offers us in Jesus “that we might be made God.”

Not the that human beings must somehow cease to be human, as though God disapproves of God’s own precious creation (an idea that is offensive to Christian faith and doctrine, and so rightly criticized), ‘being made God’ as Athanasius means it is to find ourselves participating in God’s goodness, God’s love, God’s wisdom, all that comprises God’s nature. It means also to find ourselves truly as we are, as God knows us to be, even if we don’t yet know ourselves as such. Because we participate in God’s very being we become, or discover that we are, perfectly ourselves; perfected not according to some humanly limited sense of good, better, best; but by the mystery and power of God’s Love.

It is a teaching and a truth that the Church still struggles to communicate well to the skeptical world around us. But it is also a truth that has a home with every person on earth. Human and Divine, humble yet truly God, this is Jesus: God made one with our humanity that we might be made one with God. A gift beyond compare. God’s Peace. Jim+