JESUS AND CHRIST

Colossians 1:15-23

Stephen Hamilton Wright

First Presbyterian Church, Wausau, Wisconsin                                           July 18, 2010

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            You can’t picture God.  You can’t make a picture of God.  Not that people haven’t tried, some very famously; but we understand that the God of the Bible who reigns over all creation really doesn’t have physical features, and also is not an invisible spirit of someone who could have physical features.  God is just God, a spiritual reality with Whom we can communicate, Who is nevertheless almost completely beyond our comprehension.  There is so much about the Holy One we cannot understand that the amazing thing is that we can feel any connection at all.  We can, though.  In fact, we draw close to God in a very real, very physical, very human way.  In fact, there is one way that we really do see the very essence of holiness.  Once upon a time, God came to us, in human flesh.  God still comes to us, through the very real love of Jesus.

            If you want to see God, look at Jesus.  If you want to see into the nature of God, learn about Jesus.  We hear this throughout our Christian lives, but it is still a hard idea for a lot of people.  Jesus is the only human manifestation of the nature of God.  He is both fully human and fully God.  The trouble is that the aspect of God traditionally called Father or Creator is invisible, and so is the Holy Spirit.  We may see the results of their activity, but we do not see them as fully embodied divine beings standing in front of us, as realities we can touch.  Of course, we do not see Jesus in that way now, either, but there are witnesses to His humanity.  Although we do not know the details of His earthly life exactly, we are as certain about the existence of Jesus as we are about Julius Caesar and Ben Franklin.  We have nothing that Jesus wrote, or that was written about Him during His lifetime, but the abundance of testimony to His presence in a world that did not always welcome His message is evidence of His reality.  In fact, other religions acknowledge His being.  This is a Man able to be seen, touched and heard.  That character shows that God wants to be in our world, to share our joy and try to push back the causes of sorrow.  God wants to be here for us, to shape life with generosity and love instead of fear and greed.  In Jesus, we see the God who wants to be close to us.  We see the One who cares about orphans and widows, and will not tolerate self-righteousness.  We see that God enjoys a meal with others, and forgives those pushed into bad decisions.  This is the character of the God who caused the Big Bang and caused the universe to be.  To be God is to love life.  If you want to see God, look at Jesus.

            Then, see the Christ.  Look at Jesus, and learn to see Christ.  As we learn more and more that the nature of God is exactly what we see in the earthly Jesus, the formula also starts to read the other direction.  Learning the nature of God we do not see teaches us even more about this Jesus whom we do see.  This One who loves all people with unfathomably deep passion does so because He is the first to be.  He was there as God and with God from the very beginning, and through Him the whole Universe gained its being.  “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.”  It sounds more than a little mystical, but the point is exactly the opposite.  In a culture overflowing with fantastic theories about cosmic forces and personalities, with many competing gods and spirits, where the movement of planets and stars was thought to influence a person’s fate, and human rulers claimed divine status for themselves, Jesus the Human One is named as the Christ, the truly Chosen One.  The point is that there is no mystery about the human Jesus.  What you see is what you get.  The challenge is to believe that a fully human being could actually live an ideal life—that through this perfect human being, spiritual power would flow in ways that astounded all who encountered Him.  This is not some mysterious cosmic spirit being who comes to order cosmic forces for the benefit of philosophically enlightened followers of his mysteries.  It is the very human, very connected Jesus, who in His very humanity teaches us what it means to be divine.  Look closely at Jesus, and you will see the Christ.

            Christ holds all things together for us.  Christ is the cosmic glue that holds it all together.  “He himself is the before all things, and in him all things hold together.  He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.”  This is mind-bending stuff, that seems to reach way beyond our human experience and anything that can be proven.  Proof is not the point, though.  Instead, the Bible tries to give us words for how it feels to be caught up in the experience of reality much broader than school schedules, car payments, and scheduling your next mammogram or cholesterol screening.  At our best, and maybe at our worst, too, we may sense a connectedness between events and people and the basic stuff around us that we can’t explain in normal words or concepts.  We often choose to call that connecting  reality God, and it may be what Colossians means by saying that in Christ all things hold together.  There are some who think of the whole universe as the body of God—not that our activities form God, but rather that in an amazing interactive relationship everything that happens in the whole cosmos happens as part of the activity of the Divine, both shaped by and partly shaping the life of the Holy One.  This is one more way of saying that unlike either the metaphysical constructions of classical philosophy or the capricious and distant deities of many mythologies, we believe God to be intimately connected to our very real experience.  We see that best in the earthly life of Jesus, but beyond the bounds of birth and death, His reality carries that connection into the whole universe and the full reality of God.  Christ holds all things together.

            So, we can live in love.  We can live in love.  Because the Christ we see in Jesus holds all things together to show the wonder and love of God, we know that we can live in confidence that love is the best way for all things.  This can be a hard lesson to learn.  If you start in a household where the adults have not learned this truth, or if circumstances put block you behind a social or economic eight ball, your own ability to trust in the possibility of loving neighbors may be compromised.  Beyond individual circumstances, many cultures including our own stress personal advantage and security over cooperation and community, and people get caught up in the assumption that systems of domination and control are necessary to keep any semblance of order among human beings.  Our message, the lesson we witness in Jesus, is that there is another way.  We can step out of patterns of alienation and hostility.  We know how to do this, enough that the lists sometimes sound simplistic: relax your attitude toward others, especially those from different classes or ideology; help your neighbors with simple tasks; work with the church and organizations like Heifer and Habitat and Good News and schools and the YWCA to make life better for others.  We know what to do.  The big step is deciding that we can, and sticking to that decision.  The good news is that Jesus Christ has already done the hardest part of the work.  He has made the connections for us.  Everything comes to being in Him, and He holds everything together.  That means we can do what God wants.  We can live sharing love.