Blog

How does scripture describe what it meant for Jesus to come from glory and travel all the way to what we call “Good Friday,” the day when he was crucified? Here’s a very thoughtful and sobering look at the journey he took to retrieve us from the far country:

The humbling of the eternal Son proceeded in a long sequence of ever-lowering stages culminating in death and burial. Each step is an historical event told in the Gospels as a real and true narrative of a fully human life. Taken together, key events of the humiliation of the Son reported in Scripture are pictured as this poignant sequence of ever-lowering steps:

Being in the very nature God
He does not grasp for the equality with God due Him
He empties Himself
He voluntarily gives up unbroken independent exercise of the divine attributes
He is conceived by the Holy Spirit
He is born of a poor virgin in a humble manger
He was born a Jew, a son of the law
He was made one gender on behalf of two, a man, born of a woman
He willingly took the form of a servant
He first became a child
He become subject to human growth and development
He was circumcised signifying subjection to law though He was Giver of the law
He was made like His brothers in every way that He might make atonement
He humbled Himself
He became obedient
He became voluntarily subject to instruction by parents
He worked in economic subjection lacking property
He was a common laborer in a manual occupation
He voluntarily subjected Himself to the teachers of the law
He faced all the ordinary discomforts of human finitude
He took up our human infirmities
He was despised and rejected by men
He endured the reproaches and ill-treatment by others
He was a man of sorrows, familiar with grief
He faced suffering of body, mind, and spirit
He endured political subjection to unjust political authority
He became obedient, even unto death
Even the death of the cross
He experienced the abandonment of His followers
He became a cruse for us, dying “outside the camp”
He was buried in a borrowed grave
He descended into the nether world to preach to the captives

Each step descended further than the previous one. It was an ever narrowing descent from heaven to hell. In sum He as Son of God humbled Himself in every conceivable way. He became obedient to reveal the true nature of humanity amid the dreadful conditions of the history of sin. In doing so He was prepared to serve as the representative of humanity in the Father’s presence, presenting to God the perfect obedience due from humanity (Rom. 6:14; 13:10).

What the law was powerless to do “God did in sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering” (Rom. 8:3). “God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:2; Gal 3:13; 4:4-5)

Nowhere in nature is the heart of God so fully revealed as it is in the history of Jesus: “God’s transcendent power is not so much displayed in the vastness of the heavens, or the luster of the stars, or the orderly arrangement of the universe or His perpetual oversight of it, as in His condescension to our weak nature,” wrote Gregory of Nyssa. “We marvel at the way the Godhead was entwined in human nature and, while becoming man, did not cease to be God.”

–from Classic Christianity by Thomas Oden

“In Christ all the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily,” Paul wrote in Colossians 2:9. Here’s a challenging thought on what that means, distilled from an ancient writer John of Damascus by modern writer Thomas Oden:

In Jesus, who is God-become-man, “The divine nature penetrates and perfects every aspect of the human, and the human is pervaded by the divine.”

For various reasons I’ve been delving into the groups of writers often known as “the church fathers.” Just a little, mind you, since my time (like yours) is limited. But that explains the spate of posts recently referring to people with names like Athanasius and Gregory Nazianzen (which I believe  just means “Gregory from the town of Nazianzus” –yes, Wikipedia corroborates). Anyway, it’s part of my personal reading and study, but also very much applies to our current study on Monday nights looking at what Jesus reveals to us about God, ourselves, and life. These writers from the first few hundred years of Christianity often focused on the very truths we’re pursuing in the scriptures together on Monday nights–those central, eternal depths of the core of the gospel. They loved and celebrated things like the mystery of God becoming a man, or how the cross could atone for sin, or what it means that God is three persons in one God.

And they’re full of great quotes. So here’s another passage from Gregory of Nazianzus. In this one he’s discussing some of the very things we were just looking at on Monday night last week, that Jesus surprises us by expressing God in a humble, self-effacing way, even while remaining God–and in fact, while displaying his glory precisely through this humility.

Great multitudes followed Him, and He healed them there, where the multitude was greater. If He had stayed in His own eminence, if He had not condescended to infirmity, if He had remained what He was, keeping Himself unapproachable and incomprehensible, a few perhaps would have followed Him (perhaps not even a few, possibly only Moses–and He only so far as to see with difficulty the Back Parts of God)…

But inasmuch as He strips Himself for us, inasmuch as He comes down (and I speak of an emptying, an enfeebling, as it were, a laying aside and a diminishing of His glory), He becomes by this comprehensible.

Pardon me meanwhile that I again suffer a human affection. I am filled with indignation and grief for my Christ (and I would that you might sympathize with me) when I see my Christ dishonored on this account on which He most merited honor.

Is He on this account to be dishonored, tell me, that for you, He was humble?

Is He therefore a Creature, because He cares for the creature?

Is He therefore subject to time, because He watches over those who are subject to time? Nay, He bears all things, he endures all things.

He put up with blows, He bore spitting, He tasted gall for my taste.

And even now He bears to be stoned, not only by those who deal despitefully with Him, but also by ourselves who seem to reverence Him. For to use a body is perhaps the part of those who deal despitefully and stone Him; but pardon, I say again to our infirmity, for I do not willingly stone Him–

But having no other words to use, we use what we have.

You are called the Word, and You are above Word;

You are above Light, yet are named Light;

You are called Fire (not as perceptible to our senses), but because You purge light and worthless matter; a Sword, because you split the worse from the better; a Fan, because You purge the threshing-floor and blow away all that is light and windy and lay up in the silo above all that is weighty and full; an Axe, because You cut down the worthless fig-tree after long patience, and because You cut away the roots of wickedness; the Door, because You bring in; the Way, because we go straight; the Sheep, because You are the Sacrifice; the High Priest, because You are of the Father.