3 Jan 2010 - ‘In Christ two natures met to be thy cure’

Stephen Fielding - Tewin and Ayot St Peter
George Herbert; Jn 10:30

Who is Jesus?  Who is he? That is the question that I want to try to answer this morning. Every Christmas we are reminded about who Jesus is. The Christmas story, with its narrative of Mary and Joseph, shepherds and a stable, and the birth of the Christ Child, speaks of a Jesus fully human, the person like you and me, born in a perfectly ordinary way. It reminds us of what we share with him and what he shares with us - all the common experiences of life which begin with a birth.

And alongside this birth of a human person, we hear the great opening of the gospel of John, giving us a quite different perspective in very different language.

‘ In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God and the Word was God’.

Here right at the start of John's Gospel comes the window, the lens through which are asked to view the whole of the life of Jesus, the life of one who was divine. And so at Christmas, we are brought face-to-face with a central question of our Christian faith: who must Jesus be, to behave and act as he does? The man Jesus is the man sent from God, a person both human and divine.  As George Herbert puts it, ‘In Christ two natures met’. The human and the divine. ‘Two natures met’.

John says, no one has ever seen God at any time. No one but Jesus, that is. Unlike every other messenger or envoy sent from God, Jesus alone has seen the Father, and his coming down from heaven reveals God in his own person and being. Jesus is the revelation of his Father. As John says: ‘ the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known’. Jesus is the agent of the Father. That he is, he is doing something on his father's behalf, an agent who can speak fully for the Father. Jesus is the one sent - and as an agent he subjects his will to the will of the one sending him. This is the key to understanding how Jesus, the one who is sent, is the perfect fulfilment of the divine purpose. Over and over again what is being stressed is that Jesus sets out only to do the will of his Father. So his will and his Father's will are fully aligned, so much so that later in the gospel Jesus can say: ‘I and my Father are one’. (Jn 10:30)

The one sent is subordinate to the one doing the sending. Jesus did not do his own will but the will of the one sending him.  That was how the full disclosure of the divine nature could be made.

I am sure I am making heavy weather of what to you must be a very obvious point - the point namely that the person and work of Jesus, his nature and his purpose, are inseparable. And yet the point must be made if we are to hold on to both the humanity and the divinity of Jesus. The person of Jesus is wholly invested in his work, that is, in his function and purpose. These two coincide perfectly. Jesus is the one sent, and his identity - who he is - is revealed in terms of his core task - what his purpose is.

As the Christian year progresses we will of course move from the birth of Jesus to his suffering, death and resurrection – to the purpose of his life. We will see the work perfected; we will see how his nature and person are inseparable from it. We will see how you cannot speak of the person of Jesus as both fully human and divine without also speaking of the salvation which he wrought for us.  And so we can complete what George Herbert said:

‘In Christ two natures met to be thy cure’.

He was who he was so that he could save us. His person and purpose are not to be separated, they hang together, they make no sense if they are apart.
There are lots of pictures of Jesus in the New Testament. He teaches, he tells parables, he works miracles, he is a healer. There have been many pictures of him since – revolutionary, social activist, plaster saint, ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’. We are still called to make sense of who Jesus is, holding his humanity and his divinity together.

How we can hold the divinity of Jesus and the humanity of Jesus together? I would like to suggest a way.  The key event in the life of Jesus is the cross.  His death on the cross was and is the fulfilment of the humiliation of the Son of God.  But it is also the fulfilment of the exaltation of the Son of Man. As the Son of Man he brought about reconciliation with God because he was the true covenant partner whom God had always looked for but had never been able to find. So Jesus became the fulfiller of what human existence must mean. And as the Son of God he gave a universal significance in death to his reconciling work that would have been meaningless had he been merely human. He is the priestly Son of God who ventured into the far country of sin so that he might suffer shame for us and bear it away. And he is the Royal Son of Man who is exalted to homecoming with God by virtue of his faithful obedience. So perhaps you will find it helpful to see the reconciling work of Jesus presented through the twin perspectives of his being complete in divinity and complete in humanity.

Divinity and humanity then are held together in his saving work and purpose, held together inseparably, part of the mystery of the incarnation by which he is both true man and true God.

Amen