Continuing with the reflection on God being the Lord of History, we move on to the Person of the Son.

While in Part I, we explored how people understood history in the past, and how Christianity brought a different understanding of history, this is not where it ends.

History has a central role in Christianity. Christianity cannot remain what it is without history.  If Jesus never entered into the realm of history and became man, then the beliefs of Christianity would collapse.  Christianity is not simply about the message; it is about the Messenger, the Savior.

Prague Astronomical Clock

Image from Pixabay

To contrast with other religions, if Buddha never existed, Buddhism would practically remain the same.  If Zarathustra never existed, Zoroastrianism would practically remain the same.  This is true because these are religions of ideas.  But if Jesus never existed, we wouldn’t have Christianity.  Indeed, it wouldn’t make sense, and that’s a good thing, because there is no Christianity without Christ.  This is why among the New Atheists’ characteristically poor arguments, they try to argue (unsuccessfully) that Jesus did not exist.  While they are unsuccessful, they argue this because they know exactly what Jesus’s Incarnation means for Christianity, which is Christianity itself.

The Incarnation

The Incarnation demands by its very nature to be seen as the center of history.  The Creator entered into His creation and became a part of it. He united the Uncreated and the Timeless with the Created and the Temporal.  What more could happen in that creation?  What event could be more important?  What country or empire could be more significant?  What could be more worthy of our attention?  What could be more worthy of reflection?  What could be more worth studying?  The answers to all these questions is clear: nothing could be more important.

The Incarnation itself is a message.  It tells us something more about ourselves as humans, and it tells us something more about God; it is His final revelation to us about His relationship with us.  It is what was hinted at the Old Testament; it makes perfect sense in the light of all the revelations God provided us through His Prophets and his work throughout history.  He loves us so much that He becomes one of us.

If you want to know how to think about our Lord Jesus’s Incarnation, then I highly recommend you read the book On the Incarnation, which you can get by clicking here.  You can read my review of it here.

The Life of Jesus

Not only was God satisfied with becoming man, but He lived as man with us for 33 years.  He experienced being carried in a womb, being born helpless like all other babies, being fully reliant on parents, growing, learning in His humanity, and seeing the pain and desperation of humanity on a regular basis sharing in that pain as one of them.

Shusaku Endo, in his book A Life of Jesus, explains in the clarity of a novelist (even though the book is a work of history), the experiences Jesus probably had growing up in the city of Nazareth.  This was a town of desperation, of poverty, of weakness, of humanity.  This is the city where the Son of God chose to live as man.  He didn’t choose Rome, the political and material center of the ancient world; he didn’t even choose Jerusalem, which was the city God had chosen in the Old Testament.  He chose Nazareth, a town of no importance, a forgotten city, a forgotten citizenry, in the back of the woods (so to say), to live most of His human life.  This fact of the life of Jesus also sends a message, to the point it would not have to be spoken, and that is God loves humanity, even the humanity that is totally forgotten by most people, even the humanity that lives in total desperation barely clinging onto existence.

The Preaching of Jesus: The Gospels

God in His providence and work through history, moved the followers of Jesus in the way that He had moved the Prophets to write about the future Messiah.  The Prophets of the Old Testament were inspired by the approach of God and recorded His message to humanity.  Those messages also pointed forward in time, to a New Covenant that would come to be through a New King David, an Anointed One.  The profile of this “Coming One,” in the words of Daniel the Prophet, began to be painted clearer and clearer with every Prophet until the prophets went silent with Malachi.

When the Apostles recognized Jesus as the Coming One, the Anointed One, the Messiah, they were inspired through His works and teachings to write His life.  They, unlike the Prophets, saw the fulfillment of God’s plan, so their writings complete and make sense of the Prophets.

Their works are also works of history because they are the biographies of God who became man.  Just as He became subject to the laws of nature and the nature of humanity when He became Incarnate, He also became subject to the methodology of history, and the Gospels have been studied according to historical methods, and the result has been thegreatest edifying evidence for the Christian faith.

The Resurrection

It was not enough that God become man, but He took our nature except in sin (Hebrews 4:15).  He even died our death, and by the death of His body, death itself died.  And with the Resurrection of His body, life itself will live eternally when we join His body.  Death itself has lost its power.  It used to be terrifying, binding, and final.  There was nothing to look forward to; there was no coming back.  But the death of His followers now has become a temporal thing, instead of an eternal one.  It is a time period where the spirit is separated from the body.  This logically leads to the phenomenon of martyrs.  It is no coincidence that Christianity produced a faith of martyrs, one that still continues today.  It is directly tied to the belief that Christ has conquered death once and for all, and He has all power over it.

The Eucharist

We partake of the Body and Blood of our Lord in the Eucharist, but what does that mean?  In Orthodoxy, we do not believe that we receive a part of Jesus’s body in the Eucharist, but we receive His full body in the piece we receive.  That should cause us to stop and think.

We know that the Church is the Body of Christ.  All believers are the body of Christ.  Those whom we stand next to in church, those we serve with, our pastors, those who have gone to be with the Lord, even those we did not know going back through the centuries to the earliest followers of Jesus whose names have dropped out of our collective memories but are known to God.

The partaking of the Eucharist is not simply the partaking of Christ Himself, but also the partaking of the Church who lives for Him and has become joined to His Body (Romans 6:1-14; 1 Corinthians 12:12-14, 27; Colossians 1:18).  We cannot receive Christ without His people.  If we attempt to do so, it ignores the whole purpose of His work, which is He came to make us one with each other, and all of us one with God through Him, and this is Salvation.

How should we approach those Christians who lived long before us?  Do you know that multitudes of them are still approachable going all the way back to the disciples of the Apostles and forming a steady stream until today?  You can still read their words and learn from their writings just like you learn from your bishops and pastors today.  This, however, must be understood in the light of the work of the Holy Spirit in history, which is the third and final part of this reflection on the Lord of History.

Click here to read Part III: The Holy Spirit.

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