Jesus, fully God
Readings: Colossians 1. 15-20, John 1. 1-14
Jesus is fully God, when you look at Jesus what you’re seeing is God revealing himself to us. In Jesus what you’re seeing is the God who made the universe made flesh, the image of the invisible God. It’s quite the statement isn’t it, where do we even start with that? But more importantly, what does this truth mean for how we relate to God?
We had as our readings today two wonderfully dense, rich passages, John 1 and that portion of Colossians 1. And both are beautifully putting what we declare at the start of the second section of the Creed. ‘We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father. Through him all things were made’.
So far in the Creed and in our series we’ve already declared we believe in one God, that we believe in the Father. So now we move onto the Son. As we thought about last week, God is a Father because he has a Son, so what is the Son like?
Well first things first he’s God’s only Son. He’s not a Son, he’s the Son. He’s unique, there is no other like him. Yes, we are all through faith in Jesus adopted as sons and daughters of God, but we’re sons and daughters, He’s the Son. It speaks of both his unique place and unique relationship. God doesn’t have lots of children hanging around, or all falling out as the Roman and Greek Pantheons always were. God has one Son, his only Son, that relationship is unique.
And like the Father, this Son is eternal. Eternally begotten of the Father, another way that is put in other translations is something like begotten of the Father before all worlds. In other words, before anything was, the Son was. That’s what John is telling us as he starts his Gospel.
Matthew and Luke begin their Gospels with some sort of announcement of the coming birth of the Saviour, and that this Saviour will be God’s Son. Mark doesn’t have time for any of that and jumps straight in with a brief Old Testament reference to help us understand who John the Baptist is and then goes straight into Jesus being baptised. But what John does in his Gospel is to tell us that if we really want to understand who this Jesus is we can’t start at his baptism, that if we start at Christmas with his birth we’re too late, and even going back 9 months to his conception is to join the story too late. To truly understand who Jesus is we need to go all the way back to the start, we need to go right back not just to the start of the story but to before the story, back to when it’s just God. As John puts it ‘In the beginning’. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’.
John is deliberately riffing on the opening of Genesis and is using this title Word as another title for the one we also call the Son. What he’s telling us is that before there was anything, the Son already existed. It’s not that God didn’t have a Son, but then through the Holy Spirit God made the Son in the womb of Mary, that’s not what’s going on. Nor is it that Jesus is just a man who through perfect obedience was adopted as God’s son, ascended to a delegated divinity, a heresy referred to as adoptionism. Neither of those are accurate pictures of what’s going on in the birth and life of Jesus. Neither of those are what Christianity is. The Son pre-exists the person of Jesus.
But, interestingly, neither of those errors were a major issue at Nicea when the council of Bishops met 1700 years ago. Everyone at the table agreed that the Son pre-existed Jesus, that the Son of God already was, and that he became man in the womb of Mary. The question at Nicea was, how far back does the Son go?
You may remember from last week about how Arius and his followers had stated very simply their position; there was a time when the Son was not. And unfortunately Arius was rather gifted at getting a message out, he wrote a little jingle to go with it, as far as I can tell the tune has been lost to time so I can’t sing it for you. But this idea was gaining traction. What Arius and his followers were saying was that first you had God, and then God had some sort of desire to have a creation and so he then needs a Son to do the work of creation, to make everything. So he makes the Son and then through the Son creates everything else. It’s a position modern day Jehovah’s witnesses hold to.
But once again the Arians, as this group who held this view were called, had a really needy god. This god can’t even create without needing help. He was, as Athanasius put it ‘a god in process of completion as time went on’. But also, as much as you may try and exalt the Son and speak highly of him, throw upon him all the language of deity and exaltation and worship, he’s still not the God of the universe, he is a created being. If he’s the first part of creation, then no matter how exalted or wondrous he is, he’s an infinitely inferior being to God. Which means it’s this being that becomes human, not the God of the Universe. More worrying than that, for the Arians the Son is not one who exists in a perfect and eternal loving relationship with the Father, he’s made for a task, making creation, it’s no longer relational but transactional. And if that’s how God works, what does that mean for how we relate to God? Are we beloved sons and daughters adopted into his family, or just instruments to do his will, get stuff done?
No, the God of the Universe is Father, because he has always had a Son, and so the Son is eternal too. As Church Father Gregory of Nazianzus puts it rather simply ‘When was the Son begotten? Before when’.
Now I’ve said that word a few times and you’re probably wondering about it. Begotten. You may, like I did, assume it’s a big complicated theological word. But it’s not big and complicated, it’s actually probably the simplest bit of this bit of the Creed. Begotten was a normal word we used to use that’s just dropped out of use, so now only appears in the Creed and theological study, it’s just an old word. To beget is just about coming from a male parent. All of you are begotten from your father and born from your mother. That’s it. It’s as simple as that. For some reason over time we kept being born from a mother but lost the word for coming from your Father. Now when we say the Son is begotten from the Father we mean something different than when I say I’m begotten from my Father, there was a time when I was not, for the Son of God that isn’t true.
So what does it mean that the Son is eternally begotten from the Father? What does that look like? Well, since this was the bit that was so contested at the time, the creed really beats you over the head with it. ‘God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father’. Let’s start with that last one.
He is the same substance as the Father, the same essence. It’s not that there’s a category called God, and both the Son and the Father share that category. They’re of the same substance, the same being. They’re not different versions or instances or variations, rather one divine being. The Father and the Son, and the Spirit but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, are of the numerically same being.
Now how do you get your head round that, well in some sense you don’t. We’re dealing with God here, did you think it would be simple? We’re stretching our language to its limits. But what it’s saying is that just as the Son is from the Father, so He is God from God, light from light, true God from true God. He’s really God, full God-ness with all that that entails. And you could put all sorts of things in here which define the divine perfection; infinity from infinity, almighty from almighty, omniscience from omniscience. And actually doing some reading I found there were lots of these floating around around the time of Nicea, and so it really matters that these are the ones they picked, and the rest ended up on the cutting room floor.
Light from light is this wonderfully rich image, drawing on John’s first letter ‘God is light and in him there is no darkness at all’. And we see echoes of that in our passage today from John 1 ‘the true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world’ and ‘the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it’. Light from light probably deserves a sermon in and of itself, another time perhaps. But here’s the point, the Son is in every sense the God of the Universe. As the Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas put it ‘The Son is everything the Father is, except he is a Son and not the Father’.
And then as we leave the ‘from-s’ section, just to really ram it home ‘begotten not made’. In other words, really really not created, the exact opposite of created. Whatever you think of when we say created, exactly not that. He has existed eternally from the Father, coming from him always. The Son is as much older than the incarnation as the Father is older than creation.
So why does this matter? Why were the Bishops in Nicea so determined to get this absolutely nailed down? Did they just enjoy theological precision? No. It’s because once you’ve nailed down that we really do mean that the Son is fully God in every sense of the word, not a lesser deity, or a created god, or anything else we might come up with. If he really is true God from true God, light from light, well then when he becomes incarnate in the person of Jesus then the one who is walking and talking and acting and revealing his character is the God of the Universe in the flesh. Verse 19 of that passage from Colossians ‘For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him’. The very fullness of God is present in this man Jesus. There is no other God hiding behind Jesus, he really is fully God. The one who created all of creation has joined creation. Jesus is the revelation of the God we first meet in the Old Testament. The one we meet there is now revealed more fully in the man Jesus. As John goes on to write later in chapter 1 of his Gospel ‘No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known’.
Which means when we ask what is God like, we can point to Jesus, and that’s a pretty good start to the answer. If you want to know what God is like, it’s what Jesus is like. Is God compassionate? Well Jesus was. Does God love me in my sinfulness? Well we see Jesus doing that, loving them in their sinfulness yet calling them out of their sin. How much does God love me? We see Jesus hanging on a cross. Does God care about my suffering or my pain or my loneliness? We see Jesus drawing near to people like that in the Gospels. Want to know what God is like? Look at Jesus. As the writer to the Hebrews puts it ‘The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.’
My brothers and sisters, the Son is fully God in every sense, eternally begotten, of one substance with the Father, and all those other wonderful things, which means that when the Son becomes incarnate, we truly do see God walking and talking and acting with all that that means for us. And we’re going to spend the next three weeks thinking about and rejoicing in all that that means for us. But for now let us rejoice in the fact that in Jesus we see God, the God of the Universe. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and shall be forever.
Amen.