Jesus Christ, God Incarnate

Text: Hebrews 2:10-18

After the prayers of the people today in the middle of worship, we will say “Into your hands, God of grace, we commend all for whom we pray, trusting in your mercy, through Jesus Christ, God incarnate.” That last little bit is a somewhat unusual, non-standard. In the rule books, this prayer does not end with “God incarnate.” In the books, it ends with “Jesus Christ, our Lord.” Maybe all these Sundays you have been thinking, why does he say “God incarnate”? Why doesn’t he say it the right way?

When we pray the prayers of the people, we pray in the name of Jesus. That is what Jesus taught us to do. Ask for what you want in my name, he said. Praying in the name of Jesus is like invoking a friend’s name when you want the force of your friend to give weight and authority to your words. You might be looking for a job, and you get this lead from your friend Michelle. You call the lead: “Hi. Michelle suggested I call you.” He knows Michelle, so he pays attention to you. Or on the other hand, you might be acting as an agent: “Hi, I’m calling at the request of Mayor Menino of Boston. He’d like to meet with you.” It’s a kind of official name dropping.

When you pray in the name of Jesus, you are saying, “Hi, Jesus suggested I get in touch. Jesus said I should call you.” If we end the prayers with “Jesus Christ, our Lord,” we are doing more like the Mayor Menino thing. Our connection is sort of official. But when we end with “Jesus Christ, God incarnate,” we are invoking the name of Jesus more as our friend than as our boss.

What we are trusting here is that Jesus knows us. He knows what it is like to be a human being, with all the joys and sorrows of human existence. Our prayers during this time in worship are things we desire or celebrate as humans. Human wants and longings and gratitude. That someone get well, that someone be comforted, that someone be safe, that someone be happy at a birth, a birthday, a success after hard work, a break. Someone. Some one. Some human person.

In one sense, what’s the big deal that Jesus was a person? For many people in the world, that’s all that Jesus was. A good, wise, surprising, charismatic, radical, radically compassionate, healing person. For those people, the issue is Jesus’ divinity, not his humanity. That makes sense, I suppose. There are, after all, more examples of good humans in the world than there are of divine humans. But even if it makes sense, that has not been how Christians have thought for the past twenty centuries, or at least the past nineteen. Once things settled down after a few initial heresies, Christians have been historically more likely to deny the humanity of Jesus and to take his divinity as given. Certainly in the passage from the book of Hebrews, from which we just heard, that is the issue.

The book of Hebrews has what is called in church jargon “high Christology.” What that means is that in this book Jesus is portrayed as God, eternal and of all time, from the beginning of the world to the end. But Jesus became for a while a person. “For a little while,” it says, he was “made lower than the angels.” That means us, made like us. In Hebrews, Jesus’ godly nature goes without saying. But the book makes a special effort to convince us of his human nature.

He is like us in every respect, it says. He is a brother to us. We are his brothers and sisters. We share the same parent. We share in being creatures made of blood and flesh. For some people, this fleshiness of Jesus gives them the creeps. After all, we know well the things people do that are not so good. We get into some pretty bad stuff, some unpleasant situations, some grimy spots from time to time. How can we say that our God is like us in every way when there is a lot in ourselves that we do not respect at all. Some do not want a God who is human in every way.

Besides, Jesus is made to suffer. In Hebrews, this is the clincher. It was his suffering that proved him to be human. He did not hide behind his divinity and avoid the tough and painful things that people do. Like, for example, being executed. “Why don’t you save yourself,” the people asked Jesus on the cross. But if he had, he would not have been human. Humans don’t get those kind of options. When it says that Jesus is made perfect in sufferings, it does not mean that he is made morally pure through the suffering of himself or others. It does not mean that it is good to suffer. Or that Jesus liked to suffer. It means that Jesus suffered just like all people do. People suffer. Jesus could not be a complete person without suffering. Jesus did not seek suffering, but he was bound to suffer because he was completely a person. Like us in every respect.

By being just like us, there is a sense in which Jesus is more than God. I’m not sure quite how to talk about this. Jesus is God. That’s what the Trinity means. What Jesus does, God does. There is no way in our theology that Jesus can be more than God. What I really mean is more useful, more connected to us. That is still theologically a problem. But, as Hebrews argues—and as I think we often feel—because Jesus was a human, he is closer to us. He knows us better. “He had to become like his brothers and sisters,” says Hebrews, so that he could be more merciful and more effective “in the service of God,” as it says. When God became human in Jesus, God learned something that God did not already know. God learned in a way that before God had not: what it is like to be human. To love and to suffer as a person does.

God as Jesus knows us in a different way. Jesus weeps for his friend Lazarus, his heart aches when he sees people ill, he gets angry at scumbags and oppressors. Jesus is able to say about his executioners, as he is dying, “forgive them,” because he knows how easily people are caught in a mesh of fear and greed and ignorance.

Jesus is human-sized. He knows how big the ocean seems, he knows how powerless we feel and also sometimes how unreasonably powerful. He knows how long it takes to walk from Jerusalem to Nazareth.

And above all he knows death. He knows how it feels to face death. He knows how scary that is. He knows how much the fear of death ransacks our lives. How it tears through our fragile freedom and peace of mind and peace of the world. Makes us less compassionate, makes us fill barns with more goods so we’ll always have enough, makes us hold on to things and familiar systems, makes us fastidious and obsessed. The fear of death and its less-permanent cousins makes us afraid to live. So we are slaves to death, Hebrews says. In a way that Hebrews does not detail, Jesus destroys the power of death and frees those who are enslaved by fear.

To say, to feel, “Jesus is with me” is somehow different than to say “God is with me.” God is with us because it is God’s job, God’s nature. But Jesus is with us, so it can seem, because Jesus is family. Jesus is kin. Jesus is our brother. We can call on Jesus because we are related by the demands of kinship. Jesus speaks for us because he is us.

We pray prayers of concern and celebration. We pray in confidence because we know that Jesus speaks our language—the language of human life—without translation. Our longings are not trivial, our fears not phony, our celebrations not foolish. We know that God has more than an academic, a political, a cosmic understanding of us. Because God lives here. Jesus Christ, God incarnate.