Through God Becoming a Nazarene
As Advent lead us into the Christmas season and now as it comes to an end as that Lectionary leads us into Epiphany, I have never been as enamored with the incarnation as I have been over the last few months or so. This last Sunday, December 30th, our church community reflected on the narrative in Matthew 2:13-23 which spoke of the horrific slaughter of children by Herod post the first Christmas. We concluded reading this narrative at the point in which it said “he shall be called a Nazarene.” As we were winding up our celebrating of the Christmas season and the incarnation of Christ this passage reminded us that the birth of Christ was just the beginning of the incarnational work of Christ and the reality of God becoming one with humanity in a violent world full of injustice continued well past the nativity story.
We then sang together Michael Card’s “the Nazarene”, as a way to meditate and reflect on the incarnation, followed by reading Hebrews 2:10-18 together. This passage so perfectly captures the extent of the incarnation as it tells us that Christ shared with humanity not only flesh and blood but everything humanity has to offer; the good, the bad, and the ugly; right down to suffering and even death. The writer of Hebrews says that this qualifies Jesus to be the “perfect high priest”, because the one who sanctifies and those he has sanctified have one Father. There is so much importance and power in these statements and it struck me how much the incarnation is linked to our atonement (at-one-ment) with God. In fact I am beginning to really believe that the incarnation is the single most important aspect of our salvation and sanctification; and that that even the cross is put in perspective when we understand that the suffering and death of Jesus Christ was the extension and continuation of God’s incarnational presence in the world through Christ.
There has been a lot of talk in the emergent conversation this past year about the rejection of penal substitution theory and I reject it too when taking it beyond the metaphor; I just refuse to accept the absurd idea that we have a blood thirsty God bent on making someone pay. Yet, the cross is still a big part of the gospel and so I am not advocating that we remove the cross from the message but rather we put the cross in perspective in light of the incarnation. Many are upset though because they do perceive the emergent church as trying to do away with the message of the cross, but the reality is what many of us want to do away with is reducing the cross to just a sort of pseudo-spiritual economic transaction. Jesus did far more than just pay off our tab and our debt; the power of the atonement begins with Jesus joining us in our poverty.
The work of salvation and sanctification in the body of Christ begins in the incarnation. Our life as followers of Christ is rooted in the life of Jesus Christ who met us in our humanity which includes the inevitable of suffering and death; and now through the resurrection of Christ also gives us hope for life even beyond this. My point is that the incarnation is not just a footnote to redemption, salvation and sanctification, it is the very essence of these things. The cross then fits in as part of the good news of an incarnational God that has met us where we are in this world and brings with him the Kingdom of Heaven.
When talking about salvation and atonement theory, and even the work of sanctification we too often begin this discussion at the wrong place when we just talk about the cross because we have forgotten that the context of the cross is the incarnation. I believe this was the understood context of the cross the early followers of Jesus had when they penned their testimony in the NT scriptures. I believe embracing the incarnation as the central part of the gospel gives us a far better understanding and appreciation of the gospel than just looking at the cross in a vacuum of just “payment rendered in full”.
Many emergent Christians are now focusing more on a “Christus Victor” view of atonement that is central in the Eastern Orthodox Church, based upon their understanding of the Atonement put forward by Irenaeus, called "recapitulation". I have been very struck lately at the idea of recapitulation (or an Eastern Orthodox view of “Theosis”; an early precursor to “entire sanctification” and “Christian perfection” rooted in an emphasis of the incarnation) which basically says that Jesus became what we are so that we could become what he is.
I think this has a radical impact on how we look at the work of sanctification in our lives as we understand that this process is rooted and centered in the incarnation of Christ; even the power of the cross that we traditional speak of in regards to sanctification derives its power from the incarnation. I think this shift in thinking as a course correction has major implications on how we frame our theology and live it out; which I have not even begun to touch on in this post. We have couched so much of our thinking in the cross I wonder how our perspective on everything from the life of the body, our mission in this world, and “entire sanctification” might change when we begin to put the cross back in perspective of God’s incarnational work in this world?
