On the internet there is a certain video – an experiment with children, who were asked to tell what gifts they would most like to receive for Christmas. Afterwards these children were asked what gifts, in their opinion, their parents would like for Christmas. Placing before them both the things they themselves desired and the possible gifts for their parents, these children were told to choose only one gift: for themselves or for their parents. In the touching video the children make their visibly painful choice – they want the gift intended for their parents, giving up the gift that they themselves had long wished to receive. This video is seemingly atypical of our era, in which the power of the media, with the help of advertising and broadcasts, calls us to think about ourselves and only ourselves. The experiment with the children wonderfully proved a truth so well known to Christians, that it is more blessed to give than to receive. It is about giving that is driven by love for one’s neighbour.
Is there a better time to remember the power of giving than at Christmas time! God gave everything He had– He gave Himself to humanity. Why did He do so? We find the answer in the Bible, in John 3:16, but not only there. The answer to God’s giving of His greatest gift need not even be sought in sermons or theological studies; even children today feel and are aware of it, and it is not taught in schools. This answer is engraved on our hearts; it is giving for the sake of love. God gave us Himself for the sake of love. Love is a force that has no boundaries, neither physical nor spiritual. Love is strong as fire, stronger than death and strong as a rock.
Some time ago I discovered a translation of the Bible called „The Message”. Outstanding theologians and linguists have worked on this translation, wishing the Bible not only to be translated from the newly discovered Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, but for the message of the Bible to be clear to everyone, even to those who have not grown up in a Christian society, have never gone to Sunday school, but are accustomed to virtual and interactive forms of communication. The text of Psalm 36 in „The Message” Bible has stayed in my memory as powerful poetry about the might of God’s love:
„God’s love is meteoric,
His loyalty – astronomic,
His purpose is titanic,
His verdicts – oceanic.
Yet in His vastness
nothing gets lost:
Not a man, not even a mouse
slips through the cracks.
How exquisite your love, God!
How we long to run for cover under your wings,
To eat our fill at the banquet you spread,
as you fill our cups with water from the spring of Eden.
You are an avalanche of light pouring down,
and you open our eyes to the light.”
(„The Message” Ps 36:5–9; transl. A. L.)
Of God’s love, which has shown itself in deeds and not in words, we read in John 4:9:
„The love of God has become visible among us, in that God sent His only-begotten Son into the world, so that we might live through Him.”
First let us speak about the first part of this sentence – the coming of God’s only-begotten Son into the world, and in the closing part we will touch on the second part of the verse and on the question of what the impact of Jesus’s coming is on our life. The coming of the Son of God into the world is often presented as a little fairy tale about a mystical baby, around whom the adults stand smiling and behaving calmly, but who, as soon as they move a little away from the manger, take off their mask of holiness and turn to backbiting and to pursuing their own godless aims. Christianity has nothing in common with such behaviour. But about that – in the closing part. „And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us..”
God became a human being! The first chapter of the Gospel of John describes to us the Word, or Logos, that became flesh. Logos is a Greek term whose origin is by no means connected with Christianity or the Bible, but with ancient Greek philosophy. The ancient Greek philosophers described the Logos as the eternal, unchanging mind, the fullness of wisdom that exists in spiritual reality. The evangelist borrowed the concept of the Logos from philosophy (possibly in order to express, in a Greek context, the mystery that the unchanging, eternal Word has revealed itself upon the earth). If, when reading the very beginning of the 1st chapter, it seems to us that John is writing about something unreachable and abstract, then, on reading the first three chapters of the Gospel of John, the context allows us to understand that it is about Jesus of Nazareth, God – the Logos –, who has revealed Himself among us as a human being.
Returning to the topic touched on, of the Greek religious and philosophical context, it is important to understand that the evangelist John (as well as the 3 Gospels that describe the birth of Jesus more concretely) proclaims something completely new in the Greek context of his time. In Greek philosophy (and unfortunately often in modern Christianity as well) there prevailed Plato’s view, entrenched over the centuries, that everything that exists is divided into immaterial forms and material forms. This radical separation is called dualism. It means that the spiritual world and spiritual things are separated from the material world and material things. In such a perception of the world, the view of God’s separateness developed, which has prevailed both in classical philosophy and in theology, namely that God, or the Creator of all things, is not to be found in material reality, because the properties of matter include coming into being, change and passing away. If God exists and if God is the Logos, or Mind, that is above the material, then God is immaterial, spiritual, and He has no contact with material reality, because He cannot come into being, change or pass away.
When John writes that „the Word became flesh”, he challenges both the philosophy of his time and the theology of all times, and that which we have always known about God, namely, that He is unchanging and cannot „become” something. But if God cannot „become” something, if He is the Logos, then who is Jesus? Who is this man, whom all four evangelists describe in the New Testament and whom the apostle Paul deifies? Who is the man whose birthday the Western world has celebrated for almost 2000 years? Who is Jesus of Nazareth, whose birth has changed the world’s calendar so strikingly that in the English-speaking world the abbreviation „A. D.” has still been preserved, which separates the time before the birth of Christ and after, and which means Anno Domini – „in the year of our Lord”? Historical debates about Christ’s two natures
Over the question of who Jesus Christ is – God or man –, more than a few lances have been broken in the history of Christianity! One of the earliest entries in the archives of the history of Christianity is a sermon by a certain congregational bishop, by the name of Melito, from Sardis (Sardis was located not far from the modern Turkish city of Izmir) about Jesus Christ – God – the Creator of the Universe, who has come to His creation. Melito very clearly identified Jesus with God. However, in the minds of the early Christian thinkers and congregational leaders, who had been educated in Greek philosophy, the identification of Jesus with God was by no means such an easily acceptable fact. From the 3rd to the 5th century, the most influential representatives of early Christianity (it would be more correct to say of the various currents of Christianity, because a monolithic Christianity never existed) (mainly bishops) heatedly discussed who Christ is, who came in the flesh – is Jesus Christ only Spirit, only God, or only man? There was a current that held that Jesus’s bodily body was merely a prop for the people around him (and on the cross, when Jesus suffered in the flesh, this suffering served only as a kind of optical illusion or theatrical drama, because God by definition cannot suffer). We know this teaching as Docetism.
Other theologians, of whom perhaps the most famous is Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, asserted that Jesus of Nazareth is a complete human being who points to God and leads to God, just like a door through which we enter spiritual reality, or an icon through which we can perceive God, or a mirror in which we behold the image of God and the reflection of God’s glory, yet Jesus is not God Himself, because God cannot limit Himself. Nestorius’s views were criticised, as were those of his colleague Bishop Apollinaris of Laodicea, who proposed examining the question of the existence of two natures in one man, Jesus Christ – the divine and the human. The nuance of Apollinaris’s conviction was his attempt to combine one nature with the other, but, given that God is a person and a human being is a person, then, merging into one reality, it would turn out that Jesus of Nazareth would have had two minds – the mind of God and the mind of man. This, in turn, Apollinaris did not want to allow. Therefore he taught that Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, the incarnate Logos, had a human body, a human soul, but only one mind: the mind of God – the Logos. Apollinaris’s views were rejected as heresy, because, by saying that Jesus does not have a human mind, it turns out that Jesus is not a true human being, but a puppet of God who cannot decide independently. Both Nestorius and Apollinaris were merely trying to be faithful to philosophy and mathematics, to the fact that one plus one cannot be one. As we see, the foundations laid by Plato concerning the dualism of things, in which the spiritual world and the eternal Mind, the Logos, can in no way mix with the material and created world, had (and have) an enormous influence on the perception of the world, particularly in the understanding of what, then, the evangelist John meant by the words „and the Logos became flesh”.
Various differing views of who Jesus Christ is were rejected, because in the christological debates it was important to entrench the idea that Jesus of Nazareth was simultaneously man and simultaneously God, even if such a belief should make us sacrifice the seemingly self-evident laws of physics and mathematics. The last such council discussing the personhood of Jesus Christ took place at Chalcedon in the year 451. At this council it was clearly defined that Jesus Christ has two natures – He is God and He is man– but these two natures in Jesus Christ exist without confusion, without change, without separation, without division.
If we wish to understand what these four definitions, expressed in the form of negations, about the two natures mean, what the council tried to express in the concepts of philosophy and physics, then the answer is perhaps only this – the two natures of Jesus Christ are a mystery that we will hardly grasp with the mind or be able to clothe in human language.
The view that Jesus is true God and true man nevertheless forms the foundation of our faith. This is what we confess when we say that the Son of God was born, not created. In being born, the Son retained His divine origin, but assumed the human nature. By the way, parallel to the debates over who Jesus Christ is, the theologians were occupied with the question of how to designate Jesus’s mother Mary and what her role is, if Jesus is God: to call Mary the mother of a human being, the mother of Christ, or the mother of God? The bishops agreed that, if Jesus Christ is God, then it would be most fitting to call Mary the bearer of God (not the bearer of the Trinity, but specifically in connection with the incarnation and birth of the Word through her). The Word became a human being… and?
In this part we will touch on the question of how the birth of Jesus Christ as a human being has affected humanity, if we regard this incarnation of God’s Word as the most significant event in the history of humanity.
Let us remember that in the story of the creation of the world and of man (Genesis) God’s presence upon the earth is described in an anthropomorphic way (that is, in human form, because it is written that God walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden), which people and all of creation enjoyed for a very brief moment and lost for all the remaining centuries.
The arrival of Jesus Christ upon the earth in the same way as every human being arrives upon the earth, through birth from the body of a woman, is nothing other than the return of God’s presence upon the earth, the restoration of God’s presence and the shining forth of the Light of the world to all people (to the Gentiles – but this word only means „other nations”). This particular correspondence between the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, which begins with the words „In the beginning God”, and the first words of the Gospel of John, that „In the beginning was the Word”, cannot be overlooked. In the Book of Genesis God creates with a word; in the Gospel of John God’s eternal Word, Christ, through whom everything came into being, comes Himself in order to form a new creation. The birth of Christ marks a new beginning, because God Himself intervenes in history in order to transform it!
The birth of Jesus is the breaking in of the fullness of God’s revelation into the processes of human history. This is a breaking in, in the most literal sense. The former dean of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Leuven, Prof. L. Boeve (L. Bouve), had published a book with an interesting title, „God interrupting history”. This is exactly what God has carried out. He has interrupted history. He has come to His creation, and, what is even more challenging, He has become flesh!
The Word has become flesh in order to make flesh (us, human beings) partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4).
The Word became a human being, and the Son of God became the Son of Man, so that man, coming into fellowship with the Word and thereby receiving the divine portion of a child, might become a son of God (sic! – a child; Irenaeus).
For the Son of God became a human being, so that we might become god (Athanasius and Thomas Aquinas).
If the last assertion looks too glaring and unacceptable to our humble Latvian Christianity, then let us look at what the authors of the Bible write:
“But to all who received Him, He gave the power to become children of God, to those who believe in His Name, who were born not of blood, nor of the desire of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” (John 3:12–13)
“Whoever keeps His words, in that person truly the love of God has been made perfect. By this we know that we are in Him. Whoever claims to abide in Him ought also to walk himself just as He walked.” (1 John 2:5–6)
“We have come to know and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God and God in him. By this love has been made perfect among us, so that we may have confident assurance on the day of judgement, because as He is, so also are we in this world.” (1 John 4:16–17)
And finally:
“See what love the Father has shown us, that we are called children of God, and that is what we are.” (1 John 3:1)
The coming of the Son of God, the eternal Word, has a specific aim – He became a child of man so that the children of man might become children of God. By His human existence Jesus has not only revealed what God is like, who God is and why He loves; Jesus has also demonstrated what a human being is and what a human being’s potential with God is. We can behold the highest potential of a human being with God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who spoke with fishermen in the language of fishermen, spoke with peasants in the language of peasants, who encouraged women to follow him, beginning already with the significant fact that the woman Mary is the first to carry the Word of Life, gave birth to the Word of Life, touched the Word of Life, fed Him, spoke with Him and was the first to hear Jesus’s words. In coming into the world, God chose a quite ordinary way of communicating with people. God arrived among His own in a simple way, in order to call them into His presence. In order to restore His image in the human being, in order to remind of the human being’s potential with God, that is, to be good, to love one’s God and to love one’s neighbour.
God, who has intervened in the history of humanity, lays upon people a certain duty – to think. To think about the fact that life after the birth of Christ, in which God has revealed Himself in the most direct and most tangible way, cannot be like life before God’s intervention. By thinking about God, we have the potential to find the way to become children of God. There is a beautiful Portuguese song in which the impact of the birth of Jesus Christ on the world is wonderfully and laconically expressed:
Son/Child of Heaven,
Your love makes me conquer,
Your love makes me say:
I am the Son/Child of Heaven.
(Fr. Fabio de Melo, Filho do Ceu; transl. A. L. – in Portuguese filho means both child and son)
Reflections on love in Christianity
For us who read the Bible, and also for those who do not read it, it is important to ask ourselves the questions: in what kind of God do I believe, and who is Jesus?
We have just established that God’s physical presence left humanity in the Garden of Eden, which turned into a world of cares and pains. If God’s physical presence had left humanity, is it theologically correct to seek the portrait of God in the descriptions of the Old Testament and to agree that our God stands behind wars, mass murders, laws that require sinners to be burned or stoned with stones? Does our God stand behind the worldview that a woman is a man’s property – first her father’s, then her husband’s, and if there is neither one nor the other, then – her brother’s? Does our God stand behind the ideas of xenophobia and homophobia and call us to act cruelly and with hatred? Does our God frighten us with an approaching clash of civilisations and the Islamisation of Europe?
So that we may not be confused about what God is like and what He wants from us, we must use the instruments that God has already given: we must look at the life of Jesus Christ, because in Jesus Christ God has revealed who He is, what He is like and what His will is.
First of all – Jesus did not humiliate women. In fact, Jesus most likely learned to speak from Mary, and not only to speak, but to develop the everyday social skills of life towards others, such as, for example, respect for other people. He did not humiliate and did not separate Himself from the sick and others who were outcast by society and condemned by society (we remember the woman at the well, whom Jesus turned into a missionary). He named a person of another ethnic and religious conviction, a Samaritan, as the neighbour who must be helped.
Did Jesus devote much time to talk about who must be allowed to enter the congregation, who must be allowed to take part in Holy Communion, who must be allowed to consecrate Holy Communion, who must belong to which orthodox (correct-teaching) group and who must be thrown out of the congregation? Perhaps Jesus called us to preserve our nationalism and to fear the surrounding world (which is created by God)?
In order to answer these questions, it is enough for us to open the New Testament, so to speak, to turn over a new page and put a new picture inside. In the New Testament we see what God is like. And, reading about the birth and life of the Son of God upon the earth, it seems that all the aforementioned concerns were not part of His job duties. His work was to come for the sake of love, to bear witness to love, to call into the love of God and to suffer because of the lack of love in humanity. His aim was to renew creation, because „to those who received Him, He gave the power to become children of God.” The story of Jesus of Nazareth is the story of mighty love that conquers the world. Christianity withers because of the lack of love. Love is neither words nor songs. God became a human being so that we might have the potential to become more like Him– filled with love for our Creator and our neighbour.
editor of the website Aļesja Lavrinoviča