God Is Just Like Jesus

There’s a story told about a woman who was given the gift of being able to speak the language of the bees.

And being of a religious persuasion herself, she was very interested to find out what the bees thought about God. So she went up to one who looked the scholarly type, and she said – ‘Tell me this, what is God like? Is he like you bees in any way?”

And the scholar drew himself up to his full height and said ‘Certainly not! We bees have only one sting, but the Almighty, well he has two!”.

A wee story from the eastern tradition that highlights the danger of making God in our own image.

And like it or not, that’s something we are all prone to.

God is as God is. But we can’t help but perceive God through the tinted lenses of our culture and our upbringing. The God of our brothers and sisters in America seems to be in favour of freedom and capitalism. Drive north into Canada and he’s all about tolerance and the common good.

If you ask about God in China, you’ll find he’s big on harmony and honour, but in Africa he majors in joy and supernatural power. In Latin America it’s all about family. In Protestant Europe it’s all about right thinking and right action.

And even if someone says – oh, we can get past all that cultural stuff, we just have to go back to the Bible, it’s not quite as easy as that because the Bible’s a big enough book that we’ll always find the God we want to find in its pages.

A God who brings peace, or a God who sanctions war. A God who shows compassion, or a God who withholds mercy. A God  who’s OUR GOD and no-one else’ or a God who embraces everyone.

Appealing to the Bible doesn’t help in some ways, because the truth is, we all read the Bible with our lenses on. Lenses that highlight some things and make other things almost impossible to see.  And lest we forget it - the people who wrote down the Bible in the first place, were wearing their cultural lenses even as they put pen to parchment. God in his wisdom, did not choose to edit out the human element when he gave us the scriptures.

So what are we to do? With our inherent bias and preconceptions, how can we possibly know what God is like?

Well the Christian answer to that is to say ‘we can’t know - unless God reveals himself to us. And we believe that he has done just that in the man called Jesus, the Christ’.

And today I want to argue that what we have in Jesus is the clearest revelation of what God is truly like.  Whatever our notions of God, however we’ve pieced them together from scattered texts or cultural upbringing or theologies we’ve held unquestioningly from childhood, if they represent a God who does not look like Christ, then we are fully justified in questioning them. Why? (IMAGE)

Because Scripture itself teaches us that Jesus is ‘Immanuel” – which means ‘God with us” – Mt 1:23

That ‘he is the image of the invisible God’ (Colossians 1:15)

That he is the ‘exact representation of God’s being” (Hebrews:1: 3)

That God was pleased to have ‘all his fullness’ dwell in him (Col 1:19)

and as Jesus himself said “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. I and the Father are one’ (John 14:9, 10:30)”

Scripture could not be clearer that the ultimate revelation of God is not a book or a doctrine, or a set of propositions we need to agree to. It’s a person, and that person is Jesus Christ. God is like Jesus.

With that kind of evidence, you’d wonder how we could doubt it. And yet I think many of us do.

T.F. Torrance (IMAGE) was one of the leading Scottish theologians of his generation, and he’s still held in great esteem today across the world.  During the second world war, Torrance served as an army chaplain, and in October 1944 he helped carry a young private off the battlefield under sustained gunfire. As he sat with the young man, who was clearly dying, he realised he was trying to say something and as he leaned in he heard the soldier whisper – ‘Padre. Is God really like Jesus?’. Torrance assured him that he is; but the question – and the very fact that that young man should have to ask it – profoundly affected him and the direction of his teaching and preaching from then on.

Writing about that incident shortly afterwards, Torrance said:

“What have we been doing in our preaching and teaching in the church to damage in the faith of our people the relation between their faith in Jesus Christ and in God?”

The good news I want to proclaim to you today, is that in his character, his motivation and his disposition, we can be sure that God is exactly like Jesus.

When we see Jesus blessing newlyweds with more wine than they can possibly imagine, breaking taboos by talking to a Samaritan woman at a well, healing people who were sick in body and mind; taking on those who in their arrogance thought they had God cut and dried; kneeling with a towel round his waist, washing his disciple’s feet; stretched out on a cross, entering the depths of our suffering to free humanity from the chains of death and sin. Rising in glory on Easter Sunday, and bringing our fallen humanity back with him out of sheer unwarranted love.

God is exactly like that. Like Jesus.

And our calling isn’t merely to fill a pew, hand in our envelopes, or take an active part in church life, good though those things are. Maybe our churches are in the state they’re in because we’ve wrongly believed that’s all God asks of us. No – our calling is to walk the way of Jesus. To try to live with the character, the motivation and the disposition of Jesus in all the places where he has set us. “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.”

And today we’ve heard the words of his sending as they’re recorded in Luke’s gospel: (IMAGE)

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has chosen me to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind;

to set free the oppressed

and announce that the time has come

when the Lord will save his people”.

Those words were for Jesus, at that specific moment in his ministry, but I believe they’re also for us as we seek to follow him.

Because we’re called not merely to believe, but to follow, which is far more costly.

A few months back at the last Presbytery meeting before the summer, I shared a wee insight I’d had a while back, and I want to share it with you too.

(Image)

What you’re looking at here are the words of Jesus as we find them in John’s gospel.  (Wordle – bigger the word, more often it occurs in the text)

I could study that image all day – it’s fascinating. Not only for what’s there, but what’s not there. Here it is – this is the Son of God – in John’s gospel - telling us what really matters.

It’s a sermon for another day, but we’re used to thinking that the gospel message boils down to teaching about sin and heaven and hell. Can you see sin? Can you see heaven? You won’t see hell, because he doesn’t talk about it once, in John’s gospel. He doesn’t mention it once. I wonder what you make of that.

But I digress!

Relational – Father, Son, God.

Key nouns important for Jesus – world, truth, life

Biggest number - Verbs – Come, believe, know, tell, sent, going

As expect, differences between the 4 gospels, but broad brushstrokes are largely the same.

And I think there’s a message for us here.

That genuine faith is not static. It’s a going out, a way of relating to God and to the world that helps others see the truth of what we believe.

It’s in Jesus’ going, his relating, his living, that big ideas like Truth, Life and Love come to make sense to those who were with him. And we know the truth of that from human experience!  When I’m hungry and need a meal, or lonely and need a friend, or bereft and need a shoulder to cry on, I don’t need a definition of love, however accurate it might be. I need someone there who’s putting their love in action. That’s what speaks to people.

It’s the verbs of our faith that help make sense of the nouns.

It’s in our going, our living, our loving, our helping, our praying, that others will come to believe, and to follow.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has chosen me to bring good news to the poor.”

So who are the poor in your world? They may not be cash poor, but are they poor in friendship, short of help, lacking hope?

Who are the captives in your world? And what are they captive to? Habits? Bitterness? Regrets?

Who are the blind in your world? Who needs to see things in a new way;

and who are the oppressed – weighed down by all kinds of worries and burdens that they’re trying to cope with in their own strength.

And how can you help make this time the Kairos, the opportune time, when the reality and the goodness of God finds its way into their lives through you?

This is our calling. Because we are followers of the way; not fillers of pews.

The good news for today is that God is exactly like Jesus.

The challenge for today is that we must be like him too.

Amen and thanks be to God for his word.