The challenge of our time (as with all times) is to find metaphors which reveal the essence of the gospel in ways which speak to us in our unique cultural context.
In our last article we looked at the different metaphors the writers of the New Testament used to communicate the good news of the Christ Event, especially as it relates to the death and resurrection of Jesus. We suggested that some of those metaphors may be useful for us in the 21st century once we understand the background of those metaphors. Other metaphors, dependent on religious and cultural concepts alien to our time, may no longer be useful. The challenge of our time (as with all times) is to find metaphors which reveal the essence of the gospel in ways which speak to us in our unique cultural context.
Elizabeth A. Johnson suggests that the metaphor “accompaniment” is useful for our day. Throughout the Bible God is presented as being “with us” and, indeed, with all creation throughout the ages. God walks with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day. We are told that God was with Joseph during his days of slavery and imprisonment. Moses and Jeremiah are promised God’s presence as they reluctantly accept the mantles of leadership and prophetic ministry. God accompanies the Hebrews from Egypt leading them by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. (Exodus 13:21-22) The psalmist confesses that Yahweh is with him even as he “walks through the valley of the shadow of death.” Psalm 139 celebrates that there is no place in the universe we can go which does not involve the presence of God. Johnson writes, A theology of accompaniment focuses on the saving presence of the gracious and merciful God, freely and faithfully given through thick and thin. (p, 159 All quotes from Johnson in this article come from her book Creation and the Cross: The Mercy of God for a Planet in Peril.)
Matthew’s Gospel begins with the angel telling Joseph that Jesus will be the fulfillment of God’s messianic promise to be with us (“and his name shall be called Emmanuel which means God with us.” (Matthew 1:23) Matthew ends his Gospel with Jesus’ words, “And lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” Jesus promises that where two or three are gathered together, he will be there also. (Matthew 18:20) Throughout Paul’s letters, he claims that we are “in Christ” in a powerful, corporate, and intimate way. Jesus’ Spirit is never absent. And the author of Revelation ends his book with these words: “And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold the dwelling of God with humans. God will dwell with them, and they shall be God’s people, and God’s own self will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying no pain any more, for the former things have passed away.’” (Revelation 21:1-4) The ultimate goal of God to dwell with Her people at last becomes a universal and cosmic reality.
This divine accompaniment began to be expressed with the metaphor of incarnation. This metaphor literally means “in flesh.” We should not think of “flesh” as referring only to humans. The term is used of all God’s creatures. The actual word “incarnation” is not used in the Bible but the foundation for the concept can be found throughout the New Testament. John 1:14 makes the extraordinary and shocking claim that “The Word became flesh and dwelt (tabernacled) among us.” In Jesus Christ the unfathomable God of gracious love had personally joined the flesh of the world with its vulnerability and death in order to save. In other words, in Jesus God is not only with and for human beings but is present as a human being. In Him God joined earthly life as a participant, possessing a history, a time, and a death that constitute a profoundly personal, novel, divine relationship to the world that hadn’t existed before. (p. 161)
New Testament scholars tell us that behind John’s claim that the Word has become flesh in Jesus is the Jewish concept of Wisdom (hochmah in Hebrew and sophia in Greek). Wisdom was a Jewish way of speaking about divine presence and activity in the world without compromising the unimaginable transcendence of the all holy God. Words like spirit, word, and glory are other ways such divine presence can be expressed. Biblical authors made use of these poetic figures to convey the conviction that while the all holy God was completely different from the world, being its Creator who held it in existence at every moment, this same gracious God was also immanent in the world, close by and involved. Spirit, word, glory, and other figures of speech helped keep both aspects in tension. The most highly developed of these poetic symbols of divine immanence is the Jewish figure of personified Wisdom. Standing for divine outreach in creating and saving the world, she bears a more distinctive face and has a more developed character than spirit or world. Rabbis taught that holy Wisdom who moved throughout all creation as a pure emanation of the glory of God had come to earth and dwelt among the people of Israel in the specific form of Torah. Now the early disciples made a parallel move. They taught that holy Wisdom had come to earth and dwelt among people in the specific form of their beloved Jesus. (pp. 171-172) (See Proverbs 8 and Wisdom of Solomon for references to personified Wisdom.) Within strong monotheistic belief, she is neither a replacement for nor an addition to YHWH but an alternative way of speaking about the one unfathomable God of Israel who creates and redeems the world. (p. 174)
Colossians 1:15-20, Hebrews 1:2-3, and the Gospel of John demonstrate how the early church identified Jesus with Wisdom. James Dunn concludes that this Wisdom link with Jesus is the “origin of the doctrine of incarnation.” (Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation) New Testament scholar N. T. Wright maintains that the personification of Wisdom along with the concepts of Torah, Spirit, Word, and Shekinah all were Jewish precedents for the later Christian doctrine of Incarnation. (What Saint Paul Really Said, pp. 68-84)
Once the disciples interpreted Jesus as the human being whom God as Wisdom became, belief in incarnation took root in the Christian tradition. They came to see with the eyes of faith, so to speak, that this one human being revealed the holy mystery of God through the medium of the flesh. They came to believe that God was dwelling on earth as Jesus; that full of grace and truth, Jesus was in person the historical sacrament of God’s merciful love; that he personally embodied divine presence and action in the world or human salvation and creation’s renewal. Within the inevitable limits of his historical era, geographical location, culture, gender, ethnicity, class, and every other particular that necessarily marks an individual life, his story inscribes in time a revelation of the heart of God (p. 177)
[RZ—The way I express this “scandal of particularity” is the following: The God who has been present and active all through history and all through creation through Wisdom, Word, and Spirit became focused like a laser beam in a Jewish peasant of the first century. In the flesh of one individual, God became human. Such a claim strains credulity. It speaks of a mystery which cannot be put into precise words. But it communicates what those early Christians experienced as they witnessed the Christ Event of the life, teachings, deeds, death, and resurrection of Jesus. In this “nobody” tucked away in the outskirts of the massive Roman Empire, they saw the face of God. For them, the Word had become flesh.]
There is more to be said about the concept of incarnation which we will consider in the final article of this series. Theologians refer to this additional insight as Deep Incarnation. Such an understanding has profound implications for theology, creation, ecology, and eschatology.
