Comfort and Joy

Our feature on living faith
Living Faith is a declaration of faith of the Presbyterian Church in Canada.
You can download it at presbyterian.ca. We suggest you seek out and read the passage being discussed each month.
Additional reading:Christ in Us (May 2010).

Living Faith 3.2 and 3.3 (Jesus Christ: Truly God and Truly Human)

“In silence we ponder, in awe we confess this amazing truth.”

I love the way Living Faith frames our understanding of Jesus Christ within awe-inspired worship. After all, that is what theology should be about. It is also very fitting to focus on praising and worshipping Jesus who is the Christ in this season of Advent. The brief passage in Living Faith 3.2 to 3.3.1 follows the ancient Apostles’ Creed and asserts the core of our Christian faith. We only really know who God is and what God is like by looking at and following Jesus. Our faith is not first captured in doctrines and rules, but rather in the person of Jesus Christ to whom the scriptures bear witness. Living Faith insists it is as we look at this Jesus and worship him that we grow silent, our minds are set to work right, and our hearts confess with a deep sense of respect that in the man Jesus we see the Christ, the one filled with the Holy Spirit who also is God in human form. Everything we do in church is about this central reality: Jesus shows the way and the truth and leads us to life.

This realization is as fresh as it was 2,000 years ago when Christians started to confess this central truth. About 325 years after the birth of Christ, Christian leaders gathered in a place called Nicaea to try and speak together about what they believe. There were all kinds of different perspectives and they found it hard to say in words what their hearts knew and confessed. As they reached for the right words to say, there were many controversies; yet, the words finally found form in what we know today as the Nicene Creed. You can find a translation of this creed in the Book of Praise, and you will see Living Faith uses the words from that creed to make its point. The words, “God of God, Light of Light, begotten not made,” is an exact translation of the creed. When you sing O Come All Ye Faithful this Advent, you will also be singing and confessing those same words. Living Faith is not breaking new ground in this passage; rather, it is reminding us of the beautiful confession Christians have made together since 325. We can read it and sing it and feel the awesome power of these words as they echo with Christians through the ages, many of whom have died for the privilege to confess them.

It is perhaps in its explanation about just how human Jesus is that Living Faith gives us a bit of further help. One of the things that happened after Nicaea is that Christians were so happy about saying “Jesus is God” that they forgot the other fact the old confession emphasizes—Jesus is also truly human. It is because we confess that Jesus is human that we can know God is with us in our suffering, our weakness, our pain and even death. The focus of Advent and Christmas, the coming of Jesus as a vulnerable child in the manger, reminds us that the Almighty God, the God beyond all limits, chose to limit God-self to become like us, to come to be with us, and as Eugene Peterson puts it so beautifully in his paraphrase of John 1, “to move into our neighbourhood.”

So, what does all this actually mean for you and I? First, it means comfort. Think of this: the God who is beyond everything we can understand and think, the God who will judge us is like Jesus Christ! When we realize how we fail, how we do not live up to what we could be, when we hurt others, when we just feel completely down on ourselves we can hold on to this: God is like Jesus Christ. God has entered into what we experience. Even more so, when we are afraid, in a corner, and feeling hopeless, we know that Jesus Christ was where we are. He understands and therefore God understands!

Second, it means joy. Joy that God came close to us, and remains close to us in Jesus Christ. It means joy that we can worship this kind, forgiving, loving, right-seeking God. It means joy that we can lose ourselves in worshipping God as Jesus Christ. Truly we can rejoice in singing “O come all ye faithful!” Finally, it means following. Now we know who to follow, who to trust and who to imitate in all we do.

“In silence we ponder, in awe we confess this amazing truth.”