THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER
It was characteristic of the ancient Jews that they had a vital belief
in the living GOD: and belief in GOD, and that of a far more real and
definite kind than the modern Englishman's vague admission of the
existence of a Supreme Being, was a thing which Jesus was able to take
for granted in those to whom He spoke. GOD to the Jew was the GOD of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, holy and righteous, gracious and merciful:
active and operative in the world, the Controller of events: having a
purpose for Israel and for the world, which in the process of the
world's history was being wrought out, and which would one day find
complete and adequate fulfilment in the setting up of GOD'S Eternal
Kingdom.
What Jesus did by His life and teaching was to deepen and intensify
existing faith in GOD by the revelation of GOD as Father, and to
revive and quicken the expectation of GOD'S Kingdom by the
proclamation of its near approach. The application to GOD of the term
"Father" was not new: but the revelation of what GOD'S Fatherhood
meant in the personal life and faith of Jesus Himself as Son of God
was something entirely new: while in Jesus' preaching of the Divine
Kingdom there was a note of freshness and originality, and a spiritual
assurance of certainty, which carried conviction of an entirely new
kind to the minds and hearts of those who listened.
All the more overwhelming must have seemed to the disciples the
disaster of their Master's crucifixion. It was not merely that the
hopes which in their minds had gathered about His person were
shattered: their very faith in GOD Himself, and in the goodness of
GOD, was for the time being torn up by the roots. Nothing but an event
as real and as objective as the Crucifixion itself could have reversed
for them this impression of sheer catastrophe. The resurrection of
Jesus, which was for them the wonder of wonders, not only restored to
them their faith in Him as the Christ of GOD, now "declared to be the
Son of GOD with power by the resurrection from the dead"; it also
relaid for them the foundations of faith in GOD and in His goodness
and love upon a basis of certainty henceforth never to be shaken.
"This is the message which we have heard of Him and declare unto you,
that GOD is light, and in Him is no darkness at all."
Meanwhile what of Jesus Himself--this Christ, through their
relationship to whom they had come by this new experience of the
reality of GOD? In symbolical vision they saw Him ascend up into the
heavens and vanish from bodily sight: in pictorial language they spoke
of Him as seated at GOD'S right hand. They were assured nevertheless--
and multitudes in many generations have echoed their conviction--that
He was still in their midst unseen, their living Master and Lord.
Instinctively they prayed to Him. Through Him they made their approach
to the Father. He had transformed for them their world. He was the
light of their lives. In Him was truth. He was their way to GOD.
All the great movement of Christian thought in the New Testament is
concerned in one way or another with the working out of this
experienced significance of Jesus. The maturest expression of what He
meant to them is contained in the great reflective Gospel--an
interpretation rather than a simple portrait of the historical Jesus--
which is ascribed by tradition to S. John. The Christ of the Fourth
Gospel is man, with all the attributes of most real and genuine
manhood: but He is also more than man. He is the self-utterance--the
Word--of GOD. He came forth from GOD, and went to GOD. He is the
revelation of the Father, the expression of GOD'S nature and being "in
the intelligible terms of a human life." To have seen Him is to have
seen the Father, because He and the Father are one. He is the Way, the
Truth, and the Life: the Bread that came down from heaven: the
Fountain of living water: the Lamb of GOD, that taketh away the sin of
the world.
Later Christian orthodoxy never got farther than this. All that the
formal doctrine of the Incarnation--as expressed, for example, in such
a formulary as the Athanasian Creed--can truly be said to amount to is
just the double insistence that Christ is at once truly and completely
man, and also truly and completely GOD. The paradox is left
unreconciled--"yet He is not two, but one Christ." The Godhead is
expressed in manhood: in the manhood we see GOD.
What does it mean to confess the Deity of Christ? It means just this:
that we take the character of Christ as our clue to the character of
GOD: that we interpret the life of Christ as an expression of the life
of GOD: that we affirm the conviction, based upon deep and unshakable
personal experience, that "GOD was in Christ reconciling the world
unto Himself."
What is the real question, the most fundamental of questions, which
arises when we seek to interpret the world we live in? Is it not just
the question: What is the nature or character of the ultimate Power or
Principle or Person upon which or upon whom the world depends? Is not
every religion, every imagined deity, in one sense an altar to the
unknown GOD? The venture of Christian faith consists in staking all
upon the assumption, the hypothesis abundantly verified in the life's
experience of such as make it, that the character of the unknown GOD
is revealed in Christ: that the love of Christ is the expression of
the love of GOD, the sufferings of Christ an expression of the
suffering of GOD, the triumph of Christ an expression of the eternal
victory of GOD over all the evil and wickedness which mars the wonder
of His creation. If we were to look primarily at the life of Nature,
we might be tempted to say that GOD was cruel. If we considered
certain of the works of man, we might be tempted to conclude that GOD
was devilish. Looking at Jesus we gain the assurance that GOD is Love.
We behold "the light of the knowledge of the glory of GOD in the face
of Jesus Christ," and we are satisfied.
And so we come to Jesus--the Prophet that is come into the world: and
what we shall find, if we will suffer Him to work His work in us, is
this. He will change our world for us, and will transform it. He will
redeem our souls, so that there shall be in us a new birth, a new
creation. He will show us the Father, and it shall suffice us. He will
set our feet on the road to Calvary, and we shall rejoice to be
crucified with Him. He will convert us--He will turn our lives inside
out, so that they shall have their centre in GOD, and no longer in
ourselves. He will bestow on us the Spirit without measure, so that we
shall be sons and daughters of the Highest. And we shall know that we
are of GOD, even though the whole world lieth in wickedness. And we
shall know that the Son of GOD is come, and that He hath given us an
understanding, that we may know Him that is true, and that we are in
Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ.