St. Andrew's Episcopal Church
Ayer, Massachusetts

Faith, Community, and Love

Chapter IV

WE BELIEVE IN THE SON--WHO IS HE?

"And in Jesus"

WE COME NOW TO THE KERNEL from which the Christian creeds grew. It is in this section that there is the most difference between the earlier and simpler Apostles' Creed and the later and longer Nicene Creed.

We begin with His human name, "Jesus." That was the name which Mary and Joseph gave to Him. It is just like the common names we have, like John and James and Ruth. It reminds us that the Person in whom we believe was truly a man. Other reminders of the same fact follow. He was born. He suffered under Pontius Pilate. He died and was buried.

A man is a very mysterious being. There is much about a man that we do not understand, but we can all recognize a man when we see one. The people who saw and lived with Jesus during His life on earth recognized a man, and we can still see the man in the records of His life which they have left us. He had a body like ours, which began to grow within His mother's body, was born, and then became larger and stronger until He was full grown. His body felt hungry and tired, cold or warm, like ours. He had a mind like ours, which awakened slowly out of the dim awareness of infancy; began to notice the things and people around Him; began to see things with His eyes and hear things with His ears and handle things with His hands. He learned to talk, and to share with the people around Him their thoughts and feelings. He went to school and played and worked. And slowly the time came when He began to live His own life, to think for Himself and to find His own special place in the world.

By studying the record of His life in the Gospels and the history and customs of the country in which He lived we can learn much about the way He lived. He grew up in the household of a carpenter in a small hill town. The family was poor. Probably they lived in a small stone house, with only a single room. That room was their kitchen and bed room and dining room and work room. It had hardly any furniture, only a few earthen-ware dishes and water jars, a stool, some sleeping mats, and a stand for a flickering oil lamp. Money was scarce, as it usually is in the country. The day's wages of a working man was about sixteen cents. The loss of a ten cent piece was important, so the room was swept and searched to find the lost coin. Life was neighborly in the village, as it still is in the country. The housewife told her neighbors about the coin she had lost and found. Borrowing was common. If a visitor arrived at night, when the family larder was empty, the man of the house went next door and called to his neighbor, asleep on the floor with his family, asking him to lend them some bread. Sometimes a boy in a nearby town would grow restless and rebellious at home and would go away to another town in search of pleasure and freedom.

In a simple household such as this Jesus grew up. He watched the doings of the household and the village; women turning a little hand-mill to grind the cereals into meal; sewing and reaping; leaven working in the dough; children playing at wedding processions and funeral processions in the streets. He went to a synagogue school where He learned to read and where he studied the history of God's dealings with His own people and the sayings of the great teachers of His race. He went to prayer meeings in the village synagogue, where the Scriptures were read and explained by the village teachers. As He grew older, He listened to the learned men debating about the meaning of God's law and quoting texts from the Old Testament to prove their points. Occasionally on the great feast days He traveled south by foot or on a donkey to the chief city, Jerusalem, to attend a festival service in the Temple.

He entered very deeply into the faith of His own people. We might gather up their faith in this way. They believed that heaven and earth had been brought into being by the Holy Will of God. God had chosen the Jews to be His special servants and children. God had given them a Law to live by. He held out to them the promise of a glorious future if they proved obedient to His Law. Some day He would send them a new David or a new prophet or a Heavenly Deliverer to establish His Kingdon and rule over them.

Jesus looked at the same happenings as the people around Him. He read the same books. He listened to the same teachers. But He saw much more in them than anyone else saw. There was a different Spirit in Him. He looked past the outside of things and people, which everyone could see, into the inside meaning of them. He watched things growing and was astonished that such small things as seed grow into such impressive things as shrubs and trees. He decided that this is the way of life. Little things with life in them can do great things. He watched the effortless growth of flowers. They do not strain to be anything. Then He looked within Himself and the people around Him and saw that man cannot grow by worry. He noticed that the seed scattered on the field did well or poorly according to the soil they fell upon. And He saw that to the people around Him there often came the same words, the same suggestions, the same opportunities, but some were so hard-shelled that a new idea could not get in and some so shallow that a deep thought could not take root.

Such thoughts as these must have filled His mind as He went about His carpentry. He had grown to manhood and was unknown except by the people of his own village--to them He was only the carpenter. Then a change took place. There appeared from the desert across the river that bordered His country on the east a rude, outspoken preacher. This John the Baptizer had been thinking and praying in the wilderness about the needs of his people and the will of God. At last he felt compelled to speak. Crowds came to hear John and he baptized as a sign of their turning away from wrong and being made clean for God. Among them came Jesus and asked to be baptized. He knew that repentance and cleansing were what His people most needed and He wanted to be with them in their need.

He was baptized by the desert preacher. With that baptism the conviction came to Him that God had sent Him to be the Deliverer of His people. New power came into Him from God. He felt Himself driven into the wilderness to think and pray about the work before Him.

Then His ministry began. He went about the villages, and in the village synagogue, on hillsides and on the shores of a lake. He taught the things He had seen in His years of preparation and the new truth that constantly came to Him from God. By the mysterious power of His spirit He healed many who trusted the power of God in Him.

He gathered learners and followers about Him. We usually call them disciples. They were the people who believed what He taught and believed in Him. They were ready to go where He went and do what He asked them to do. They wanted to help Him a little if they could. It would have been hard for these first disciples to say exactly why they followed Him. If they had talked our language they might have said something like this: "He is right. We are wrong, but we want to be right. He is clean. We want to be clean. He is generous, steady, confident. We are often ungenerous, very shaky, and uncertain. We want to be more like Him. We do not know what to call Him, but He is the best we have found. If He is ready to give so much for us, we must be worth a great deal. He makes us feel more important. Everything seems to count more. But He does not make us vain. He makes us humble. When we are with Him, God seems very near and real. It is good to be with Him. We want to keep near Him."

His words meant a great deal to them and they treasured them. But more than His words, there was beauty and mystery and power in His life that drew them and yet held them at a distance. That is the way holiness always affects people. It makes them feel little and big at the same time. It attracts them in the way beauty and goodness attracts them, and at the same time seems far off and almost terrifying. As St. Paul put it, men saw "the glory of God in the face of Jesus."

The disciples were not many. Often those very near Him were blind to the truth He shared with them. His family thought He was a fool. Most of the people in his own village could not get over the idea that He was merely a carpenter. The rulers thought He was dangerous. The learned teachers of the Laws of God suspected that this Galilean who dealt so freely with tradition and was so friendly with tax collectors and sinners and spoke so confidently about the will of God was possessed by the Devil, not by the Spirit. The leaders of the Jewish Church, hearing rumors that He claimed to be the Messiah, were shocked at such blasphemy.

The opposition became intense. Jesus, keeping His faith in little things and quiet things, withdrew to share more deeply with His few faithful friends the truth God had given Him. Then finally He set His face towards Jerusalem to carry through the work of God. He went unarmed into the camp of His enemies and put all His trust in the power of God. His emenies dealt with Him as He expected they would. But He was not one to turn back when things looked dark and difficult.

He "suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried." At least His enemies thought He was dead and buried.

To believe in Jesus is first of all to believe in the Man who was born and grew and suffered and died, as His first friends believed in Him. It means to believe what He teaches us and to be ready to follow Him.

"Christ . . . our Lord"

The first disciples began by seeing in Jesus a man they were ready to follow. Very quickly they saw that He was no ordinary man. He taught as no other man taught. He had powers that other men lacked. There was a mystery about Him. Who was He? They tried to find the right title for Him. He was certainly a teacher sent from God. He was a prophet, that is a man who had a direct message from God for them. He was their Master, the one who had a right to command them. But none of these titles was high enough to say what He meant to them.

Jesus did not talk a great deal about Himself. He talked chiefly about God and His Kingdom. But when He had come to trust His nearest disciples and they had come to trust Him, He shared with them a secret He had with His Father. The secret of His life could not be expressed by the titles, Teacher or Prophet or Master. He was God's promised King of men. He was "the Man of God's own choosing." He was the Messiah, the Christ. To be ready to give Jesus that title was no light thing for those first disciples. It was not just adding another word to His name. It meant wholehearted devotion of their lives to His service. He was to be obeyed before any earthly king or ruler. He came first, before father or mother or wife or business. He was King of kings. To say we believe in Jesus "the Christ" is to confess Him as the one whom God has chosen to rule over our lives.

To call Him "our Lord" is to hammer home the same loyalty. A man's Lord is the one whom he serves. He is the one to whom a man belongs. God is often called "the Lord" because He is the One to be served and obeyed before anyone else. Christians have called Jesus "our Lord" because they believe that He shares with His Father the rulership over our hearts.

"His only son"

Jesus saw in men the sons of God, because He knew God as the Father. This sonship towards God was the most precious thing in men. His task was to help them to enter into it. For sonship is both something that is and something that ought to be. We are sons of our human fathers because our lives came from their lives. We belong to them. When they are good fathers they care for us as their own and want to share the best they have with us. That sonship we can never destroy. But we only become true sons by accepting that love and living as sons. Jesus saw in men sons who had not entered ino the full blessedness of sonship with God. They had misused the Father's gifts. They were unbrotherly with the Father's other children. They needed to come home again and start a new life with God and their brothers. Jesus wanted to share with men His own perfect sonship.

Those who followed Jesus saw that He had what they wanted. In Him man's sonship with God had not been hurt by any disobedience or unfaithfulness. He lived so near to the Father that the Father and He always thought as one and worked together. He was able to tell men what God had told him. He saw things with His Father's eyes. So they felt that the truest way to say what had happened with the coming to them of Jesus was that God had sent His own son to them. This was better than saying that the world's King had sent His favorite Ambassador or that the world's Manager had sent His chief Servant. Of course the words are human words and the pictures they suggest to us are pictures drawn from our human life. We have no others to use. But how can we say better what the coming of Jesus has meant to us than that God sent His son? He sent the One who was nearest to Him and dearest to Him to help us become sons of God.

"God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God"

The first followers of Jesus saw that He was a man. The record of His truly human life was kept in the Gospels, especially the three earliest Gospels, those of St. Mark, St. Matthew, and St. Luke, which were written during the seventy years between the Crucifixion and the year A. D. 100. When we read these Gospels we recognize the Man Jesus whom they knew and remembered. It is true that He was so clearly a unique man and did such mysterious things the Christians were sometimes tempted to think He was a strange superhuman being, an angel or half-god. His enemies thought His power must come from the Devil. But the Church held fast to the memories of His human life, His being born of a human mother, His eating and drinking, talking, walking, hungering, thirsting, dying. They put that conviction that He was a true man into our creeds.

We have seen that they never thought of Him as an ordinary man. He saw things that other men did not see. He knew things that other men did not know. He could do what other men were helpless to do. Above all He lived in a constant communion with God that marked Him off from other men. At first they tried to explain Him by saying that He was a man who had been sent on a great errand by God and given special power and authority for doing God's work among men. He was like a king's messenger or ambassador, to whom the king had given his own power and authority. That way of thinking of Him is expressed in His title of Messiah or Christ and helps to tell the truth about Him.

But as Christians continued to wonder concerning Him and sought to tell others who He was, another way of thinking of Him took possession of their minds. Like all men of true religion they felt the tremendous difference between God and man. The thought of the power of God made them feel small and weak. The thought of the cleanness of God brought home to them the fact that they were soiled. Men come and go quickly, but God "was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be." God is as high above us as the heavens, and more vast and full of mystery than the spaces into which we try to look on a clear night. Yet in the life of the Man Jesus, God had come near to men. His clean holiness was the holiness of God. His self-giving goodness was the goodness of God. His doings were the doings of God. Not only did God use this human life, as one person uses another person to accomplish his purposes or carry his message, but God dwelt in Him. The love of God for men did not remain afar off directing the Man Jesus; the love of God entered into Him and possessed Him and used Him. The mind of God took human form and was made plain to us in Him. God entered man's life to lift men to His own presence. God is Light, man had said, the light that awakens man from being half-asleep and half-alive, the light in which everything is shown as it really is. That Light of God shone through the human life of Jesus. God is Life, the fullest and most abundant life, from which all other life comes. That Life of God lived in Jesus. God is Truth, the Truth which gives meaning to everything. The Truth of God is made known in the life and mind of Jesus. This is the thought that runs through the Gospel of St. John, which is the latest of the Gospels to be written. It is not so much a record of the human life of the Man Jesus as a pageant of His life in which the writer puts into His mouth words that express what Christians in the year A. D. 100 had found Him to be. He is One who can say to men, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." "I am the Light of the world." "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."

Following this line of thought the Church was faced with the question, Is the Light and Life in Jesus really the Light and Life of God? When He draws near to us and we to Him, are we coming in touch with the very thing that God is? The Church answered, Yes, and uttered that conviction in the words of the creed, "God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God . . . of one substance with the Father."

This use by God of a truly human life to be the bearer of His own giving of Himself is in line with all His doings. He is always using plain and humble things to carry and bring forth something higher. The plainest materials of soil and air and light go into the making of the rarest plants. The stuff of plants and lower animals is built up into the life of our human bodies. All our powers of thought and feeling are founded on the mysterious workings of our bodies. The greatest artist can make no beauty until he finds his crude piece of stone to cut, or goes through the patient work of mixing his colors. The highest thing we know in human life is the love between friends or in family life, but as the Lord said, love may show itself best in something as simple as giving a cup of cold water to one who is thirsty. The highest things use the commonest things to dwell in and show themselves. And God used the body and mind and heart of a country carpenter to show Himself to us.

"Conceived by the Holy Ghost, Born of the Virgin Mary"

There is no more familiar part of the story of Christ's life than the Christmas stories of His birth. Probably most of us hear of Him first in connection with those stories. If we read carefully the first chapters of all of the four Gospels we discover that these accounts of His birth are found in the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke in somewhat different forms. They are not found in the first Gospel that was written, that of St. Mark. Nor is there any reference to them in the letters of St. Paul, which were written before any of our Gospels. We do not know how the writers of the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke learned of these stories. Of course the times they deal with were some years before the disciples of Jesus first met Him. Some have imagined that Mary, the mother of Jesus, told them. That may be so. She would have known best what happened at the time of His birth.

These stories tell us that His birth was very unusual. They tell us that Joseph, the husband of Mary, had nothing to do with His birth, but that God by the power of His Spirit caused the new life to begin to grow. Whoever first told of these wonderful happenings, the stories became a part of the Gospels and they were treasured by the Church and brought down to us. When the creeds were written the words "conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary" were included, partly because they were part of the record which all Christians accepted, partly to stress the fact that Jesus was truly born.

The main point of these happenings for those who first wrote them was that the life of Jesus was in a very special way the work of God. His coming among us was not the doing of man. His wonderful gifts were not received from men. They were received directly from His Father in heaven.

Though men have had various ideas as to why Jesus should have been born in an unusual way, the fact that He was born in that way was hardly questioned at all until quite recent times. It is still not questioned by the larger part of those who call themselves Christians. But there are a considerable number of Christians who earnestly question it. They believe that Jesus is their Master and Lord, God's King of men, and that in and through His human life God Himself has shown His character and given His life to us, but they doubt whether Jesus was born in the way the Christmas stories tell us.

The reasons for this questioning are many. Since science has developed, men have seen how regular are God's workings in nature and have grown more critical about reported exceptions in those workings. As they have learned more about history they have seen how quickly stories of marvels gather around the records of those who have impressed men deeply with their powers. The careful study of the Bible has made it clear that God has used very human writers to tell us of Himself and His will. On the other side, those who support the truth of these stories remind us that they come from very early writings, quite near to the time when Jesus lived; that there is so much extraordinary in His life that we must hesitate to deny other wonders; and that though the workings of God in nature are generally so regular, still the world is full of surprises and mystery. In the face of these differences between sincere Christians our own branch of the Church continues to express our common faith in the language of the ancient creeds. Probably most members of the Church take the words in their literal meaning. Others think of them as part of the poetry of religion, expressing the truth that our Lord's life was uniquely a gift and work of God.

Continue to Chapter V. We Believe in the Son--His Work for Us