Full Contact Christianity

While Jesus was sitting in a house teaching one day, they told Him His mother and brothers were waiting outside to see Him. He gestured around the room and said “These are My mother and brothers. Whoever does the will of God is My mother and brother and sister.” How can He do that?

Modern people know better than anybody that you can’t just declare a new family willy-nilly. We’ve tried over and over with fandoms and music and various brand loyalties. Just because we both like Mustangs or My Chemical Romance or Glocks doesn’t mean we have to see each other at Thanksgiving. Declaring a new family takes serious spiritual horsepower. It takes a superior blood tie to supplant the blood of the clan—and in Jesus, we have that. But do we use it?

It’s a bit like we’ve been given a mansion—title, keys, the whole bit—but we’re reluctant to go inside and see what the rooms look like. Being united to Jesus, we are united to each other. But we can only reap the benefits of that union if we’re willing to explore it. I’ve been exploring seriously for the past 16 years, and y’all…it’s amazing. These are the people who rebuke me when I’m wrong, support me when I’m weak, heal me when I’m broken. They’ve seen me at my neurotic worst and helped me be my best. It’s real.

We just gotta go do it.

God’s insane risk tolerance allows Him to use particular people—sinful ones at that—to represent Him. It seems the craziest thing in the world. Men and women, adults and children, every tribe and socioeconomic station, all gathered together in one group—how can that possibly work? What do they have in common that’s stronger than what divides them?

It’s not what, it’s who. The Epistle to the Ephesians, Paul’s meditation on unity, lays it out: in the Church, people from all races and walks of life are united to Christ, and therefore to each other. Before the very principalities and powers that kept us divided in the old world, the Church displays the “multicolored wisdom of God.” The fact that we can unite without being perfect makes it an even greater miracle.

If we are going to become fit for the Kingdom to come, if we are going to try to cram as much heaven into the present as possible, then we have to work together. In Jesus, we can. We come to one Table together, hear one another, discern God’s voice together without regard for station. Seem like a pipe dream? I see it happen every week. Perfectly? Of course not. But truly—and if it’s real, then the kingdom of God has come upon you; heaven is touching earth.

Come and see.

If the particularity and ordinariness of Jesus is offensive, the ordinariness of His people is even worse. It’s one thing for God to work through Jesus, the man without sin. But what are we to make of Christians? Vanity, greed, lust, envy…you can find all the seven deadlies hard at work in the church nearest you. I promise.

The humility of God knows no bounds. It would have been enough for infinite God to squeeze through a birth canal and manifest in the perfect man Jesus, but He doesn’t stop there. He would rather be imperfectly present to your neighbor through your flesh and blood than be perfectly absent in the sky somewhere, safely removed from any danger that you might tarnish His reputation.

Raises the stakes, doesn’t it? You, as a human, are the image of God. You can’t opt out. Your character and conduct either reflect God’s as a good image, or they lie about Him. What’s it gonna be? The good news is, if you’re even margially willing, He won’t leave you as you are; He will pay any cost to make you fit for the job. He doesn’t care where you started; St. Paul was a terrorist and murderer, and look what God did with him.

Gives me hope.

The anonymous author of the book of Hebrews meditates extensively on who Jesus was and what He did. Because all God’s children partake of flesh and blood, so did Jesus our brother. Because we die, so did Jesus. He was tempted in every way like us, but without sin.

After a wind-up like that, you expect to hear a blistering challenge: “No excuses! Quit whining! Work harder, you lazy bums!” Instead, it says He sympathizes. “Let us come boldly…so that we might find mercy and obtain grace to help when we need it.” Precisely because Jesus knows how hard it is, He never wants us to be afraid to come to Him. Jesus wants us to ask for help.

Help with what? What are we striving for? ““What is man?…You have put all things under his feet.” The old world was under the care of angels, but God “has not put the world to come in subjection to angels.” As we move toward the future, this man Jesus, our elder brother, has ascended to rule the world to come—and He is bringing us with Him. This life is where we forge character fit to rule the world.

We need all the help we can get.

When Paul was invited to address the philosophers of Athens, he knew he was talking to a culture that divided the world into just two categories: Greeks and barbarians. Against that, Paul proclaimed that God “made from one blood every nation of men under heaven.” Every nation’s circumstances were orchestrated by God “so that they might grope after Him and find Him,” Paul said, and then added, “though He is not far from each one of us.” No special advantage for being Greek.

That was offensive enough, but Paul wasn’t done. God calls everyone to repent, he said, because He “has appointed a day on which He will judge the world…by the man whom He has chosen.” He is talking, of course, of Jesus—not a Greek, not even a scholar, but a Galilean construction worker!

It is one thing to judge the world from on high. God could do that, but in Jesus, He did something very different. He subjected Himself to the limitations of flesh, was tired, hungry, and cold, was tempted as we are, unjustly slandered and judicially murdered—and faced it all without sin. He is not only a model for us all, He is the end to our precious pretensions. Before the true divine man, we are no better than anyone else, and we have no special excuses for our failures. We are simply human.

So was He, and that is the point.

We are always tempted to yearn for earlier times. But we are born at one point on the timeline and die at another, and for our entire lives in between, we ride our bodies inexorably forward, never back. We are all time travellers, and we only move in one direction. As the clock turns, older things don’t necessarily go away, but they lose their power to compel. You can still play with Matchbox cars or dolls or whatever, and it’s fun for a few minutes…but remember when you could spend all day at it, and still be mad that Mom was making you stop to eat supper?

We graduate from toys to driving, from driving for its own sake to all the places driving can take us, to the people we can share those places with—first friends and love interests, then a spouse, then our children. It’s not that we lose the simple pleasure of skittering a Matchbox car across the kitchen floor or taking a drive in the country, but we discover there’s more beyond it…and more…and more again. Every direction we look, there are further glories to uncover.

We have moments when we want to go back, or to freeze time and never change anything…but we can’t. We can build on the past, but we have to keep our eyes on the road — the future is where we’re going. Along the way, we have the opportunity to anticipate as much heaven as we can cram into the present. But how do you get spiritual heaven into this physical mess? Have faith; it can be done.

Don’t forget: now, even God has a body.

In his meditation on human freedom, the Epistle to the Galatians, Saint Paul outlines how in humanity’s childhood, we were kept under guard by “the basic elements of the world”—the stability of blood and soil, the natural powers and angelic principalities, even the Torah itself. “But when the fullness of the time had come,” Paul says, “God sent forth His Son…that we might receive the adoption as sons.” Something about the Incarnation means that we’ve come of age; we’re no longer under tutors.

We receive this freedom quite apart from whether we deserve it—Paul makes it rather clear we don’t—and with no guarantee that we will exercise it responsibly. Humanity newly in Christ is a bit like a teenager taking the family car for a solo drive for the first time. Hard lessons are virtually guaranteed. And this is in fact exactly what we see: nice as it is to have all those new possibilities, freedom is terrifying, the potential for disaster all too real.  

We are as alienated and neurotic as we’ve ever been. Cut off from the old sources of certainty, we try to forge a new identity from hobbies, fandoms, sartorial choices. But it takes more than (say) Jeep ownership, the Broncos, and a model airplane club to sustain a human soul. And we know it—that’s why we have to keep adding stuff, or totally reinvent ourselves every few years. But like that teenager out for the first solo drive, we can’t just quit; we’re already on the highway.

We gotta learn how to drive.

There was more to the stifling stability of the ancient world than just social constructs; humanity was “a little lower than the angels.” The world into which Jesus was born was subject to angelic powers that governed via human intermediaries. A couple millennia after Jesus destroyed the system, the details are hard to reconstruct, but we know the broad outlines.

In the antediluvian world, we had close contact with angels, learned from them, sometimes had children with them. After the flood, there was more distance, but the basic arrangement continued. Even God’s law was mediated to men by angels (Acts 7:53). Under the powers, the court magicians worked real magic and the “divine” kings exercised a supernatural insight and charisma that historian John Pilkey once described as a kind of “Gentile Pentecost.” It was a world of fixed tribal identities under tutelary deities, a world of thousand-year empires and very little change. You couldn’t make the demons leave.

Before Jesus, exorcism amounted to restraining the possessed person and then doing things the demon wouldn’t like until it finally chose to leave. It could take days. Jesus did nothing like that; He commanded demons to leave, and they went. This was new: a man had authority over angels. The old order shattered: everywhere the gospel went, the patron gods lost their authority and the “divine” kings fell. With a man ascended to God’s right hand, the era of real human rule began…and we share in it.

This is both good news and bad news.

We have come so far from the world Jesus was born into that we forget how that world was a place of stifling stability. In the classical world, the major markers of your life were all predictable the day you were born: your trade, friends, spouse, residence, all of it. The twin powers of blood and soil dictated everything. Today we call that fascism; they called it common sense.

Jesus was born into that fascist world. The blood ties of His clan and the soil of His birthplace dictated a certain kind of life: He should practice His (presumed) father’s trade, marry a girl of equivalent station in the village, listen to the rabbis, pay His taxes to the Romans. Being born out of wedlock, He was also expected to submit to lifelong shame: they were still throwing that in His face in His 30s (John 8:41).

But a human partaking in the divine nature is not bound by blood and soil. Simply by incarnating and living the life His Father set before Him, Jesus broke that world forever. Everywhere His followers have gone, pursuing our common Father’s business, we have done unexpected things: care for orphans and widows, heal the sick, lift the last, the lost, and the least. We have called tyrants to repentance, founded hospitals, funded scientists, freed slaves. The progress has been slow—the Kingdom of God is like leaven—and because slow, easily forgotten.

Let us remember, that we might be grateful.

The ancient Jews were preoccupied with social station and purity before God, the Greeks with finding unchanging certainty beyond the messy and decaying physical realm. God offended both groups in the incarnation, the Jews by becoming this particular man—born out of wedlock to a nobody—and the Greeks by incarnating at all. In different ways, the incarnation was blasphemy to both groups.

The incarnation is just as blasphemous today. We vaunt our identity categories above everything—male, female, gay, straight, black, white, asian, 1%ers or 1%, you name it. We don’t believe anyone can represent us or grasp our lived experience unless they tick all the same boxes. We flatter ourselves that we can claim, create, or discover for ourselves an identity that is more important that the human identity we were given as a gift from our loving Creator.

But God became a particular human, born in a specific place and time, having a particular ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic station. In that one particular person, Jesus shared in all that is essentially human, in order that all humans might be able to share in the divine nature. That which we already have in common with Jesus—our essential humanity—we also have in common with each other. The more we come to share in the divine nature, the closer we will draw to one another.

Let us be grateful that this is the case; the alternatives are not attractive.