LORD AND CHRIST
A lady I know says she has trouble with the birth of Christ.  Well, so did Herod!  But my friend's trouble is with the understanding that the birth of Jesus was as God and as a baby.  The poet John Milton called Jesus the 'infant God.'  My friend can understand the human side of birth with Mary being pregnant; she can find a way to relate to God as coming to earth, but to put the two together she simply cannot fathom it.

  I appreciate how she has come to terms with her own faith and limitations.  She is like the woman in John 4, she has told the truth.  And I think she represents millions of us who have trouble with Jesus being---both Lord and Christ, Acts 2.36.

  Some of us stay on the side of Jesus as a man.  We search for the historical Jesus, the man of fingerprints and sweat and sandals.  Several attempts have been made in my lifetime to say Jesus never went to the cross, He never died and rose---He just went away with Mary to have a mundane life.  This was D.H. Lawrence's The Man Who Died, Nikos Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ, the Passover Plot, and the DaVinci Code.  All of these say Jesus was not God.  Jewish intellectuals have always claimed Jesus was just another rabbi.

  Some of us stay on the spiritual side, claiming Jesus was God but not a man.  This was an original heresy in the early centuries of the church.  Jesus merely seemed to be a man, but like one of the gods in Homer, merely appeared to be human when He never really was.

  So now, to believe that Jesus was God and He was human, that has taken the church a few centuries to understand.

  We certainly can't wrap our minds around it; but we can believe it.  If Jesus were no more than divinity like the Greek gods, the world would have forgotten about Him.  He would be off in someone's imagination, someone's memory, but no more.  If He were only a man he would be in history books as a failed deliverer, one among many.  As a man he might proved some axiom but that wouldn't convince anyone.

  Jesus rose from the dead.  There are many accounts of the risen Christ by His adversaries among the Romans and the Jews.  God doesn't die; humans don't come back to life.

  It is beyond us all that He was both Lord and Christ.  Today we have no mechanism by which to combine humanity and divinity that compliments our own minds, so we don't believe it.  Some of us go toward the divinity side of Jesus by pursuing signs, miracles and wonders, or some form of religion which denies the human.  Some of us go toward the human side, saying if we can't prove Jesus was God He must not have been.  So several writers have taken it as their task to prove Jesus lived.  This can be done, but does it change the heart and soul of a person?  Maybe not.

  We could look at our century, our own times and see one one side the human rationalists saying if something can't be understood by rational processes, it doesn't exist.  I am reminded of one of Shakespeare's lines--
    there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio
    than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
And we can look at our century, our own time and see those who only believe in strange spiritualities which have no ground of being.  People who lock themselves in a cell until a wild dream comes through the iron bars, people who have rapturous fits, who don't et for days and abuse their bodies, 1 Timothy 4.3-5.

  Only in Jesus Christ do we have someone who is the ground of being and the fulfillment of truth.

  So how do we believe this?  We do not stand back from Him, trying to hold in one hand His divinity and in the other hand His humanity as if we could balance the two.  One does not neutralize the other.  But if we ask Him to reveal Himself to us, He will give us all of Himself we can receive.

  And we can receive what He will reveal, after all we are made in His image.  The positive aspect of this is that we have all eternity to work it out.