Jesus Christ

The Christian claim is simply this: if God is, then God is love; and if God is love, then God is what Jesus is: total self-giving. Or, to put it even more starkly: if God isn’t what Jesus is, there is no God …

In Jesus we, as it were, encounter the impossible in the flesh: we encounter the victim of our hatred returning to us not as our just punishment, or even as our conditional pardon, but as our peace-bestowing mercy and reconciliation, our “salvation” (which actually means “healing”, from the Latin salve).

Jesus is what God looks like “in person”, in “human flesh”. Why? Because this is what absolute love actually looks like in a world marked by hatred, violence, resentment, fear and vengeance—in a word, sin and death. If this is not so, then there is no God.

In GNFL this understanding of Jesus is developed with these theological emphases:

• The doctrine of the incarnation is principally about us becoming one with God because God becomes one of us. As one of the earliest and strongest defenders of the doctrine of the incarnation, St Athanasius, put it: “God became human so that humanity might become God”. This is the point of the incarnation: human transformation, human divinisation.
• So, to say that “Jesus is Lord” is to say that if God is not what Jesus is, there is no God; and if God is what Jesus is, then God is love; and we are becoming what Jesus is by the power of that love, who is the Holy Spirit.
• The fact that Jesus is utterly human is of the very greatest importance to a properly Christian understanding of what it means that he is God incarnate.
• The fact that he was a Jew is crucial: he was steeped in the Hebrew Revelation, its liturgy and poetry and ethics, its bonds of community and covenant love.
• The fact that he suffered, worked, prayed, cared, healed, and ate with “sinners” and “righteous” alike; the fact that he befriended men and women, and called them into discipleship; the fact that he was a teacher, healer, worker—a “simple poor peasant” (as opposed to a priest, noble, imperial citizen, etc.)—all this is vital to who Jesus was, and therefore to the Revelation of who God is among us.
• For it is in and through his humanity—in all its particularity and “scandalous contingency”—that Jesus reveals what God is really like: self-emptying love.
• Jesus reveals love for what it really is: self-giving for the sake of the one who is loved. Love is not a feeling so much as a desire that the one who is loved should flourish: to love is to want what is good and best for another.
• Jesus is absolute love made real, made “flesh and blood”, revealing that absolute love is who God really is. How?
• By giving himself absolutely for those he loved—namely everyone, even those who hated him so much that they tortured him to death, betrayed him to his torturers (like the apostle Judas), denied they knew him (like St Peter, the first pope), abandoned him (like all the other apostles and most of his disciples) or simply ignored him (like the vast majority of people throughout history).
• His love for all of them was equal because it was absolute: he died for love of us all, and indeed, for each one of us personally. That is how he reveals and embodies the love that is God.

URL link to Theological Conversation chapter (PDF).