Full Contact Christianity

Reading: Hebrews 2

Jesus, by taking on humanity, became “a little lower than the angels,” as Psalm 8 says. But Psalm 8 also says that God “put all things under” man’s feet. So which is it? Are the angels above Jesus, or under His feet? The author of Hebrews resolves this tension by pointing out that it’s a process. Jesus became lower so that He “might taste death for everyone,” and for exactly that reason He is “crowned with glory and honor.” As we already saw in chapter 1, He sits at God’s right hand until His enemies are made His footstool. 

But Psalm 8 is not principally a meditation on the Messiah; it’s a meditation on the nature of humanity. Through Jesus, God is “bringing many sons to glory.” And so Jesus unashamedly calls us His brothers and sisters, prefigured in the words of Psalm 22 (“I will declare Your name to My brothers”) and Isaiah 8 (“Here am I, and the children God has given Me”).

Isaiah 8 is particularly striking, written just before a catastrophic invasion. Isaiah’s ministry was to announce the impending judgment and that God would preserve His people through it. Knowing his homeland was about to be invaded and destroyed, Isaiah did the most foolish thing you can imagine: he kept having kids. Because God assured him that there was hope, and he believed God’s promise. Likewise Jesus, believing God’s promise that He is bringing many sons to glory, is not ashamed to call us His brothers and sisters, to identify fully with us. It’s a sign of hope that can’t be faked. He became one of us, so that we could one day be His companions, “crowned with glory and honor.”

For a longer discussion of this passage, see Episode 2 and Episode 3 of my podcast with Chris Morrison at Gulfside Ministries.

Reading: Hebrews 1

In the opening verses of Hebrews 1, we learn that the Son has been appointed heir of all things. This is not a status He’s had from eternity; He earned it in the incarnation when He purged our sins and redeemed the entire human race, and now He sits as an incarnate son of Adam at the right hand of God. That’s good news for us, but there’s more. 

“You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; therefore God, Your God, has anointed You with the oil of gladness more than Your companions.” He may have purged our sins “by Himself,” but in His victory, the Son is not alone. He has companions. Who are these companions of the Son? What do we know about them? At this point, all the text tells us is that He is anointed with the oil of gladness “more” than His companions—which means these companions share His anointing. They get lesser portions of the same thing.
How does one become a companion of the victorious Son? Keep reading; that’s one of the questions Hebrews was written to answer. We’ll be exploring the answers Hebrews gives over the rest of Christmastide. 

For a longer discussion of this passage, see my podcast with Chris Morrison at Gulfside Ministries.

The stockings are stuffed with goodies, the presents are under the tree; the scents of good things to come waft from the kitchen to fill the home. We have been waiting for a month, and the day has arrived. Tomorrow, we will begin digging into the meaning of the Incarnation of God. Today, it is enough that it happened.

God the Maker of all things, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, God who came on Sinai in storm and fire, God who dwelt between the cherubim on the Mercy Seat—that God, the God, entered a human womb, squeezed through a birth canal, and became God with us. This is our God, and we are His people. So lift up your hearts in celebration. Give your gifts, and receive what is given to you in turn. Eat the fat, and drink the sweet with a merry heart. God has been generous with us, and nothing could be more fitting than to enjoy it! Merry Christmas!

Epiphany is the day we celebrate Jesus revealed to the Gentile world. Nothing Mary and Joseph could have said or done would have convinced the Magi – wealthy, powerful astrologers, philosophers, and rulers – to pay attention to a toddler. But God pulled it off. Through a combination of Balaam’s fourth prophecy (1400 years before Jesus was born), Daniel’s rise to chief of the Magi in the Babylonian captivity (900 years after that), and signs in the heavens, God led them from their home in the empire next door to a construction worker’s house in Bethlehem. What did they find there? A treasure hoard, a magical amulet, scrolls brimming with ancient secrets? No. Just a person, Jesus Himself. And they worshiped.

Mary and Joseph, for their part – what did they get? Did they get a vindication that salvaged their reputations with their families? No. They got gold, frankincense, and myrrh – symbolic gifts to be sure, but more importantly in the moment, unexpected wealth with which to fund their flight to Egypt to save their child’s life. 

God gives us enough. He doesn’t often give us what we expected, but He gives us what we need. When God reveals Jesus to you, it will be the same way: not necessarily what you like or how you expected, but what you need, when you need it. Say yes – Jesus is enough. 

In hindsight, it’s easy to see how key figures at pivotal moments in history have opportunities to enact major social change: St. Fabiola, the Nicene bishops, or Basil of Caesarea for hospitals; for slavery, figures like William Wilberforce, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. But most of us don’t find ourselves in that kind of position, and that’s ok. Remember how Jesus constantly surprised people by acting on the Father’s guidance? Follow His example and act where you are. 

That’s what St. Paul did. St. Paul wasn’t in a pivotal position to abolish slavery either, but that didn’t stop him from doing something surprising when God dropped an opportunity in his lap. A runaway slave named Onesimus came into Paul’s circle, having fled from a Christian master named Philemon – a man Paul knew. As a runaway, Onesimus could have been executed. Paul wasn’t in a position to take down the institution of slavery, but by doing what he could, he planted the seeds of its demise. In one short letter that has haunted slaveholders for centuries, Paul forced Philemon to resolve his former slave’s precarious legal position, freed Onesimus, and did it all at his own expense. 

“I appeal to you for my son Onesimus…I am sending him back….Perhaps he departed for a while for this purpose, that you might receive him forever, no longer as a slave but better than a slave—a beloved brother….If you consider me a partner, receive him as you would receive me. If he has wronged you or owes you anything, charge it to me….I will pay it back.” (The whole letter is only a few hundred words long – click through and read it; it’s worth your time.)

The question is never about what you can’t do.  The question is what you can do, right where you are. Perhaps you can’t change healthcare, but you can change the bandage on a homeless man’s hand. You can’t change the past, but you can provide a firm hug and a soft landing for someone who’s trying to put their life back together. Jesus came to heal the brokenhearted, free the oppressed, heal the sick – follow Him by doing what’s nearest and clearest, what’s within your reach right now. (In an age of social media slacktivism, I feel compelled to add: You can’t “stand with” anybody while sitting on your ass. Go actually do the thing.) Merry Christmas! 

“Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother/And in His name, all aggression shall cease.” My favorite Christmas song has been “O Holy Night” since I was a kid. Those two lines from the second verse are my favorite part. Whence this bold assertion of brotherhood with a slave? You won’t find that anywhere in the ancient world, but it fits very naturally in a Christmas song. Why?

Ubiquitous across time and culture, slavery is everywhere in history and still practiced in places to this day. Jesus came to liberate the captives, and Christians started working against slavery very early, but abolition was slow and painful. By the late Middle Ages, a number of jurisdictions in Christendom had rejected slavery, but then we lost ground and had to stomp it out all over again several centuries later. We didn’t bin it for good until 1865. In the long argument over slavery, a lot of the apologists for slavery were Christians. Christians today find that embarrassing, and should. 

It’s particularly embarrassing because abolition is uniquely ours. The entire discourse of abolition was–and still is–conducted on Christian principles. And it was so wildly successful that the whole Western world now thinks of the universal brotherhood of humanity (and therefore abolition and equality) as common sense. We often forget that to this day, the Christian West remains the only culture in world history ever to abolish slavery as a matter of moral principle, because it’s harmful to the slaves. We think that’s common sense now, but only after Jesus did it become common sense, and only in Christian and Christ-haunted places does it remain common sense.  

For which all thanksgiving. Merry Christmas!

“The Kingdom of God is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until all was leavened.” That’s the way Jesus taught us to think about the Kingdom: it grows like yeast. Ever made bread? You put the yeast in, make the dough, and then go about your business. There are some variables you can tweak to help it rise a little faster or slower, but yeast is alive, and it does its work even when you’re not looking. Slowly. So slowly, in many cases, that it’s hard to see. 

Jesus sent His followers to heal the sick, and we’ve cared for the sick and dying everywhere we’ve ever gone. We stayed in the plague-ridden cities to care for the sick when Galen fled to the countryside. We founded and staffed leper colonies at risk of our lives. We scoured the hillsides for unwanted babies abandoned by their parents (a crime now, but common practice in the ancient world). We literally invented the concept of public hospitals. We’ve been so successful that today, everybody just thinks having hospitals is common sense. Nobody thinks of hospitals as a peculiarly Christian thing. But even in a city as young as Denver, most of the hospitals were founded by Christians: Rose and St. Joseph’s (Catholic), Swedish (Lutheran), Porter and Littleton (Adventist), Presbyterian/St. Luke’s, and so on. 
This is Christmas working its way out across history: God incarnate in Jesus offers us all access to the divine nature. That being the case, humanity is unitable in principle; in an important way, we are already one, and should treat each other accordingly.

Merry Christmas! 

So to review: God incarnate in Jesus destroys our certainty about who we are and how we relate to the world; calls us to abandon our respectability; challenges us to forsake simplistic decision-making and listen to God’s voice. He renders angelic powers and allegedly divine human rulers un-worshipable, and in their place gives us a direct relationship with God as our Father, effectively forcing us into spiritual adulthood. Add it all up, and it’s profoundly destructive. “You want to know why you’re so unhappy?” my mentor Rich once bellowed at a crowd. “Because Jesus ruined everything!” 

So He did. Where’s He going with all that? Jesus told us: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed; to proclaim the favorable year of the LORD,” and again: “If I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, surely the Kingdom of God has come upon you.” 

The old world dies so that the new world can be born – a world of freedom and healing that Jesus calls the Kingdom of God. What will that be like? The prophets Jesus quoted talk of a time when the lion lies down with the lamb, when disease, hunger, and war are no more. We are obviously not there yet. Do we have to wait until then? Jesus says no; if He’s the real thing, then it’s already here. Fully here? Of course not. But truly here nonetheless. How would you like to live there? 

You can – it’s what Christmas is all about. Merry Christmas!