“Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God” (1 John 4:2).
I have recently experienced The Passion of the Christ, a film by Mel Gibson. It has set me to thinking about the scandal of the cross – and the utter mystery of the incarnation.
The church through the ages has struggled to articulate a Biblical doctrine of the incarnation. Jesus was fully human while remaining fully divine. Of the corresponding poles, and contrary to what you might suppose, the church has found it easier by far to believe in Jesus’ divinity. We have found it more difficult to believe that Jesus was truly a human being.
Gibson’s graphic film shows why. The human experience can be pretty provocative.
The Christian church is happy to worship a heavenly Christ – the more heavenly the better, in fact. Consider the world of traditional Christian art and film. We are happy to depict our Jesus in the clouds, surrounded by angels and all aglow with heavenly radiance. Even his earthly life is pictured with some radiance. He will wear a halo, often enough. He is pleasantly pastel – typically blue-eyed and blonde – and serenely remote from the hurly-burly in which real human beings must live. Heaven is rather far away, after all.
But the truly human face of Jesus – and in particular, the miserable face of Calvary – is more difficult to contemplate. Here is one “despised and rejected.” “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” Here is one “from whom others hide their faces…despised …held of no account” (Isaiah 53:2,3). This Jesus wears no halo. He is fully and resolutely engaged in the drama of our lives. The celestial Jesus, for all of his radiance, seems conventional and safe by comparison. But the truly human Jesus precipitates controversy everywhere he goes. He looks you squarely in the eye – and once you catch his gaze, your life is never quite the same again.
So it is little wonder that the church through the ages has generated more heresies in denial of Jesus’ humanity than in rejection of his divinity. There is a deep and unsettling power in the humanity of Jesus. A haloed, ethereal Jesus is one thing. But a flogged and bloodied Jesus – a thoroughly human Jesus – is quite another. He is more than we bargained for. Here is one who can speak with compassion and authority from the uttermost depths of the human experience. There is no one beyond his reach and nothing beyond his penetrating love. That is why heretics have pretended him away.
It is also why the bloody cross of this incarnate Jesus has inspired more faith, unlocked more love, stirred more obedience – and made more missionaries – than all the lectures and urgings and compulsion in the world. “The love of Christ urges us on,” St. Paul explained long ago, “because we are convinced that one has died for all…And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them” (2 Corinthians 5:14,15). “So we are ambassadors for Christ…” (v. 20).
I am thinking that some percentage of Christians who have interacted with The Passion of the Christ will insist on new and daring obedience to the mission of God in the earth. Love will move them, because they are convinced – once again – that one has died for all.
Perhaps you are among them.