Welcome to Advent and Christmas: A Human Jesus Who is Divine That Makes us Human Again
WHAT JUST HAPPENED? (Christology)
In “The Container We Have Built For You,” the fifth chapter in Caste: The Origins of our Discontents,” (2020) author Isabel Wilkerson writes of how Whites construct a world wherein being White means having position and possibility and is superior but being Black means being subservient and disqualified and is inferior. She tells of interviewing a woman named Miss about Miss’s experience growing up as a young black girl. During the interview as Miss talked she took a sugar jar on the table and took the top off and put it back on to illustrate her comments about how she sees White folks putting Black folks into a “container,” both historically in America and in her personal life. The “container” is something Whites have built where there is no real and human person living inside the Black Skin on a Black Body. The reason White people construct this “container” of Black is to insure a White superiority. If a Black person is not actually a person, but instead a “container,” then that “container” need not be respected and treated equally or humanely. If Black Bodies were actual persons, not “containers,” they would be the moral and intellectual equivalents of White Bodies and persons to whom the White persons would be morally obligated to be humane.
This Advent and Christmas, these days in 2023 December, we look again at God’s arrival.
In what “container” do we put the person of Jesus? Rather than seeing a human Jesus, God arrives in a “Container” we have built for God. This Container is Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence. I’ll call this Container the “3-O’s.” There is no actual person, a human Jesus, living in this Container, inside this 3-0 Skin on that 3-0 Body. Jesus is not actually and essentially (more on “essence” below) human. Yes, we say that there is a human Jesus there and we have a number of theological gymnastic moves to say this (too, more on that below), but no, the important thing and the identifying thing and the driving force that shapes how we relate to Jesus are the 3-O’s. It’s important to us that we not allow there to be a real and actual and total person there because if there is then we would have no power and authority anymore over that Body and that person would be our equal and we would be moral and intellectual equivalents and be obligated to be humane to this Body just as we are humane to our own Bodies. I know this sounds counter-intuitive to what God as 3-O would be in relation to a Human. How could someone Human, by definition not all powerful, knowledgeable and present, have power and authority over someone Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Omnipresent? In this way: God as 3-O is a God who remains distant and unreal and subject to our definitions and placements and determinations and then too our supplications and calls for assistance and then too our establishment of agreements (call them covenants) for the conditions under which such assistance is given and then too our explanations and reasonings (call them theological doctrines) for what has transpired in real time when in real time our supplications are not heeded (e. g. “we need to be patient”, or, “we need to behave better or believe more accurately before we get what we need”, all of which, mind you, is something we can in fact do and thus we believe we have power and authority to change our condition). If, instead of all this that comes with a God who is 3-0, there is an actual person we encounter, the what and who of this person forces contingencies upon us, forces us to engage what this person brings, good and bad, and to do so humanely since the person is human. We cannot make things up about the person or have them do things we want them to do. They are a human person to be engaged, not a divine thing to be manipulated.
Traditional Christian thinking today is that the 3-O Container of God did become a person once but that this was only a temporary attire put upon the Body of the 3-O Container. It was a disguise. God is not actually human. God is 3-0 and will always be 3-0. We can accept the temporary attire, the disguise, because it is temporary. Soon it will be stripped away and the Real God (3-O) will be revealed and will save us. This saving, salvation, will be by our own definition, satisfying our own needs and desires. The reason this must happen is that we must, we need, to have a God who brings us victory over the things we determine and decide put us at risk.
The traditional teaching about the Resurrection of Jesus is where we find this Container narrative described: God was in human clothing, but was not actually human. Or, if God was human, the 3-O’s were displayed in the Resurrection event to mystically if not magically transform that human life back to divine. Church teaching, dogma, is littered throughout history with positions posing solutions to the dilemma of how divinity could be human or humanity could be divine. The Church Council of Chalcedon in 451 C.E worked to put to rest Nestorianism and Monophysitism but the offshoots and the variations on the theme are multitude.
There is only one that I can see that is honest and does not superimpose our needs for a Superhuman Savior over reality. It is this: Jesus, the divine one, was only such not in any essence (“essential nature”), to use the Greek philosophical language and categories of reality from which we get the 3-0’s in the first place. He was divine only in the incidence (“accidental nature”) of his self-giving life and love. Jesus was human. Period. His essence was Human. And the reason he drew a following of people, a recognition by people and devotion from people was because his very human life was actually what humanity is made of and meant to be. He was divine not in essence, but in incidence, as Human. It was his “agape” (Greek for the type of love that is self-sacrificing and self-giving) love that is divine. The resurrection of Jesus did not make him divine. The resurrection made his self-giving love the very definition of being human. The resurrection of Jesus tells us all not that a human being Jesus lives forever but that a self-giving love lives forever as the heartbeat, the essence, of humanity. The resurrection points to Jesus’ life and death and says “that is what humanity is all about, what life itself actually is!”
There is, then, no supernatural intervention that happened then in the First Century Common Era or that will happen now or will happen in the future. There is only Jesus the Palestinian Jew, and what we are able to see and hear of his life and death. We call him divine because we see in him something and someone that essentially and actually is our true self, something of our authentic essence that we essentially are but actually are not and actually will not be.
Thus, Advent and Christmas. The coming and arrival of authentic humanity.
WHAT NOW? (Faith and Ethics)
He has arrived. When faced with Jesus, what are we to do? Not only what do we make of him, but what do we do because of him?
The only thing, only response we can make in the face of this raw and brutal truth (that we will not be who we really are) is to ask for forgiveness (we call it repentance).
Yes, we can try to be “who we really are.” And we do. We can try to be this self-sacrificing and self-giving Self that is true humanity, true life, truly human. And we can even accomplish a life, be the life, that gives itself away. Many throughout history have done so. But in the end, if not at the start, we cannot because we will not give up the notion, the faith, that it is in our giving of Self that we accomplish our humanity. We will not give up the notion, the faith, that we are the ones who accomplish and attain our true Self and that we do so by Self-Giving. In the end, if not at the start, we are the subject and true humanity is the object. We are the subject and God is the object. We believe can affect and impact and change God. To put it bluntly, we are God. Do we see? This is what we call Original Sin. We cannot not be all about ourselves. We will not not be all about ourselves. To do so, to not be all about ourselves, is suicide.
The Christian faith, then, is to encounter Jesus of Nazareth, the Palestinian Jew, and not find inspiration for our greater achievements or substitution for our imperfections but rather confession of our unwillingness to trust God alone and let God alone be our companion and destiny as self-giving lovers of all creation, all persons and the natural world. The Christian faith is God killing us, homicide, so that a new life may arise. A new life of God alone in whom we live.
When we confess we do not trust it is precisely at that moment that we are doing the trusting. When we confess we will not have faith in Christ but rather have faith in ourselves is precisely the moment we have faith in Christ.
When we confess, this happens: it is God putting us to death and giving us back God’s life all at the same time.
Does not faith in Christ bring living for justice for all? Does not faith in Christ bring living that self-giving love so our neighbor thrives? Of course it does. But many do not have faith in Christ yet do the justice and the self-giving love. We do not bemoan others’ justice work and self-giving love. We celebrate it and partner with it. But faith in Christ is just what it says: faith in Christ, not ourselves.
SUMMARIZING “WHAT JUST HAPPENED?” AND “WHAT NOW?”
God is too often in our thinking and belief the Container of 3-O’s and not what God actually is: a Palestinian Jew. This construction of the 3-0’s keeps God at a distance, gives us power and position over God because we can access these 3-O’s for our safety and security, and this temporally and eternally. When instead of that God is a Palestinian Jew who is dying because the Law killed him and rising to kill the Law (Law being those definitions and boundaries we create to tame the wildness of a radical generosity and sharing – “you just can’t give it away, can you?!” and “you can’t just let anybody in, can you!?”) our game of spirituality is over and we have only one life until it’s over and that’s that.
When humanity dies, it is dead. Can we live with that? When we do, we live in the faith that is the Lord Jesus Christ. And we live that faith out in love.
Welcome to Advent and Christmas. God’s coming to the world as a human being and the transformation to humanity that happens to us and which is our salvation.
