Joan Osbourne, a contemporary song writer penned a wake-up song entitled: If God Was One of Us.
In some ways it is a Christmas song, although it doesn’t sound like one. The song is full of questions:
If God had a name, what would it be?
And would you call it to His face
If you were faced with Him
in all His glory?
What would you ask if you
had just one question?
And yeah yeah, God is great
yeah, yeah, God is good.
What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us?
Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make His way home?
If God had a face what would it look like?
And would you want to see
If seeing meant that you
would have to believe
In things like heaven and in Jesus
and the saints and all the prophets?
And yeah yeah, God is great
yeah, yeah, God is good.
As Christians celebrating Christmas we know the name of God is Jesus, meaning He will save His people, as the gospels tell us. He is the great and good God through whom all things were created. The big surprise of Christmas however, is that God chose to be one of us. He chose to become a human being – a slob like one of us. Or to put it in the language of Isaiah 53, “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”
Osbourne asks, “Would you want to see if seeing meant that you would have to believe in things like heaven and in Jesus and the saints and all the prophets?” That’s the crunch isn’t it? It isn’t that people don’t want to believe in God and goodness in a general way but the problem is what some theologians have called the scandal of particularity. To believe in the Christian God means we have to also believe in some challenging things like God was incarnate, uniquely in His only begotten son Jesus, whom we confess was born of the Virgin Mary. Often people don’t want to believe what they can’t fully understand and so they choose to live in denial and don’t see the face of God. Some try to make God more general and pick just the parts they like and so they deny that Jesus was really real. Instead they substitute a theoretical Jesus.
This Jesus is not really God in the flesh but rather he is the embodiment of Godly principles. They will claim that it doesn’t matter if one actually believes in an historical Jesus, born in Bethlehem, so long as one tries to live in love as Jesus taught. The problem is that they no longer see the face of God. God becomes impersonal and like all philosophy He is just an idea that is in vogue until a better idea comes along or proves too inconvenient. Jesus on the other hand is a real live person whom we need to relate to as he reveals himself in history and through the Holy Spirit. We listen to him speak and we call him by name. He is like no other. As another Christmas song asks the question: What Child is this? It answers as the whole church has throughout the ages: This is the Word made flesh, the babe, the son of Mary.
The Jesus of Christmas that the church worships is not simply an imaginary person like Santa Claus, jolly and full of goodness, nor the personification of an ideal but he is God who has become one of us in the flesh!
This year have a wonder-filled Christmas!
