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"Son
of God and Son of Man" December
22, 2002 The Rev. Dr. Will Eisenhower A few minutes ago we sang:
Beautiful Savior,
Lord of the nations,
Son of God,
and Son of Man. And our sermon this morning is going to look at those two
designations, those two descriptions of Jesus:
Son of Man, Son of God. We're
going to seek to remind ourselves about what each of those means and the context
in which they came to us, then we're going to talk about the importance of
keeping both of them together (not setting one against the other), and last of
all we're going to ask, And what about in our day? Why not just set those aside and similar descriptions of
Jesus that we've inherited from the past? Why
not just set those aside and make up some new ones of our own?
So that's what we're going to look at.
And this sermon is another installment in the Advent series looking
at the subject of the incarnation, where we remind ourselves that the baby born
in Bethlehem is, after all, the incarnate Word of God.
And you might want to read along with me as we begin looking at John
chapter 3. Jesus is talking to
Nicodemus. We are beginning in the
middle of the conversation as "Son of Man" and "Son of God"
come up. And if we look at John
chapter 3, beginning in verse 12, this is what we find: Jesus says, "If I have told you about earthly things and you
do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?
No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven,
the Son of Man. And just as Moses
lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up
that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that
everyone who believes in him may not perish, but have eternal life.
Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the
world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Now, in this part of the conversation with Nicodemus, "Son of
Man" is talked about. Jesus
says that just as Moses lifted up the serpent (and this is an incident that his
hearers would have all remembered from the story of the Israelites wandering in
the wilderness). "Just as
Moses at one point lifted up a serpent in the wilderness, so in the same
way," he says, "the Son of Man has to be lifted up so that whoever
believes in him will have eternal life."
But immediately then He begins talking about God so loving the world and
sending His Son. And now we're
talking about "Son of God." So what are those two descriptions? Well, there can be a certain amount of confusion, especially
about the "Son of Man" description.
That's not a part of the American milieu. Really, you know, other than from what we know about it in
Scripture, we wouldn't know what's being talked about with "Son of
Man." Just to illustrate that
point, I was watching a PBS program having to do with Jesus--I think about a
year ago or so--and they were interviewing scholars and others who had written
books on Jesus. There was a former
nun who had written a book on Jesus, and she was being asked.
And she said, "Oh, I think when Jesus called Himself 'Son of Man,'
He was seeking to just be very, very humble, and He was choosing a very lowly
category for Himself." Well, she's right that Jesus did call Himself "Son of
Man" an awful lot. And, as a
matter of fact, if you compare how many times in the synoptic gospels Jesus
talked about Himself, far and away the majority of them He does not say
"Son of God." He says,
"Son of Man." However, it
is completely misguided--mistaken--to say He was trying to speak very, very
humbly and not lifting Himself up in saying, "Son of Man."
Actually, we couldn't be further from the truth!
Because by the time we get to the day of Jesus, the Jews knew that
"Son of Man" meant "Messiah who is to come."
It's a category that sort of evolves through Scripture, and by the time
we get to Daniel, "Son of Man" has become a technical title to refer
to the Messiah, but in particular, a supernatural Messiah, a heavenly Messiah
sent from heaven to earth. So Jesus
is saying here--verse 13: No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from
heaven, the Son of Man. Now when he says that, none of His hearers are surprised when He
says this because they all know in Daniel "one like a Son of Man" is
described as coming, a spiritual figure, a supernatural figure, sort of a cosmic
figure. And the "Son of
Man" was known in the generations prior to Jesus, among the Jewish people,
and at the time of Jesus, as a designation for the Messiah.
So when Jesus talks about Himself as the Son of Man, it is not the
case that He's sort of being mysterious and sort of veiled in His descriptions
of Himself. It is not the
case that He's being meek and lowly and doormat in His description.
No. This is a well-known
title for the Messiah. Now in this same conversation we are told that God sends His Son
("God so loves the world that he gave his only begotten Son") and now
the "Son" is still the same, but now we're not talking about the Son
of Man any more. We're talking
about the Son of God. And so the
issue changes a little bit, and whereas because of feminists and others at the
present time rejecting terms like "Son of God" and saying we can't see
Jesus that way, other scholars have sort of risen to the challenge.
Just for one, Mary Ann My Thompson teaches New Testament at Fuller
Seminary and is a very respected New Testament scholar.
In her most recent book she says something very, very important about the
Bible's depiction of Jesus as Son of God, saying it has nothing to do with
gender, has no implication that God might be male in saying God is the God and
Father of Jesus. No. The Father and
Son relationship with Jesus, when you look at the actual way that it's used in
the New Testament passages where it comes up, gender is not the issue.
Inheritance is the issue. And
in a first century context, there was no other way really to say the Son is
going to inherit everything that the Father has to bestow, in order to pass it
on to us. And Jesus, as Son of God,
is presented to us in the Bible as the inheritor of the divine estate on our
behalf. Now, we need to say less we be misunderstood:
In the American context I think when we call someone "son of
something," we mean it in a diminutive sense.
We mean "a smaller version than."
When you hear someone on the news talk shows and they refer to our
current President as "son of Bush," we can assume they mean it in some
sort of a pejorative way. You know, a sort of "less than:"
"current President, son of Bush."
In the first century context, "son of" did not mean
"less than." It did not
mean "little version of." When
Jesus gave James and John the nickname "sons of thunder," he didn't
mean "little pipsqueak." What
He meant was "equal to." "You
guys come on just like . . ." Do you understand? "Son
of God" means, in the way that the Bible wants us to understand it,
"equal to" God. And the
Church spent a long, long time--I mean three centuries--trying to figure out how
do we bring together Son of Man, Son of God, and all of these designations, and
how do we understand them. At times there were those who said, "Well, Jesus, you know,
was fully man and kind of God, but not quite really God."
But the Church rejected that view. There
were other times people said, "Jesus is, you know, fully God and kind of
man, but not quite." Finally
the Church said, "No. Jesus
Christ is fully God and fully man." And
what they did in saying "fully God" is to take that term "son
of" and understand it the way that the Bible understands it, as saying
"fully God and equal to God." So
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are God in three persons and each one co-equal.
And it is not the case that God sent a "junior version" to die
on the cross to save you from your sins. God
sent the whole thing. God sent
God-co-equal-to-God-the-Father, God the Son.
And so you can be assured that the forgiveness that you have through
Jesus is thoroughgoing, because the Ultimate died on the cross for you, you
understand. Now, we've got "Son of Man." And "Son of Man" points us in the direction of the
entire Old Testament history of God's chosen people and the longings for the
Messiah that we know to culminate in Jesus.
Now, how important is that? Well,
that's very, very important. And
Presbyterians have always been among the ones who have said we treasure the New
Testament, yes, but our Bible is not just the New Testament.
It's the Old Testament as well. Not
every denomination, not every Christian denomination, honors New Testament and
Old Testament as much as Presbyterians traditionally have.
We have always been . . . You know, you may have a little New Testament Bible in your pocket
or in your purse--you know, "New Testament and Psalms"--because if you
take away the Old Testament, the Bible suddenly gets a lot smaller, and a lot
easier, and a lot lighter to carry! I'm
not going to criticize you for carrying that little Bible in your purse or in
your pocket, but just to say in the Presbyterian Church, that's not the whole
Bible. There are other
denominations that would go ahead and treat it as if that were the entire Bible. I was talking with my Presbytery Exec at my last presbytery, Ken
Moe, in the Grand Canyons presbytery. He's
the Presbytery Exec and we were talking about this and he was saying, "Let
me tell you." In one of our
churches in the Grand Canyon presbytery, they hired a gal who is a Methodist
minister. A Presbyterian Church
hired a Methodist minister (and I know some of you are going, "I didn't
know you could do that." Well,
you can. You can hire a Methodist.)
So he was meeting with her to say, "So how's it going?
You, with your Methodist Church background, how's it going in this
Presbyterian Church?" She
said, "Well, you know, they're exactly the same.
There's just one thing that puzzles me.
They keep asking me to preach on the Old Testament." She'd never run into that before. She just didn't understand.
Well, welcome to the Presbyterian Church!
We believe that the whole thing is from God, that the whole thing is
God's Word to us, and we want it all. You
know, we want our preachers to preach on the New Testament passages, but we want
our preachers to preach on the Old Testament passages if for no other reason
than this: The Old Testament has the Jewish longings for the Messiah
recorded for us and we know that to understand Jesus Christ fully, you have to
understand that Jewish context out of which He came, that Jewish context that
prepared the way for the coming Messiah. "Son
of Man" points us in that direction. Now, it is the case that as the first century apostles, as the
first evangelists, went out into the world, when the started moving out away
from the synagogue and into Greco-Roman culture, they knew that the audience did
not have an appreciation for the Jewish Scriptures.
We're now trying to tell people about Jesus who don't know anything about
Abraham, and Moses, and David. Who
don't know anything about Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.
And so as they went out into that culture, though Son of God and Son of
Man were very, very important, naturally they went with the half of the
designation that would be much more easy to explain to a non-Jewish audience. "Son of God" is the way Jesus typically got talked
about in a non-Jewish setting. Believers
would get an awareness of who Jesus was as He was called Son of God, and then,
once a commitment is made, then we explain the Jewish Scriptures.
But it's not important first to turn someone into a Jew, explaining the
Old Testament to them, and then telling them about Jesus because we know it to
be the case that we understand the old covenant in light of the new covenant. We
understand the Jewish longings by looking first at Jesus.
And so, it takes something as simple as the little symbol that the
early church used for its faith. The
fish symbol. Do you know the fish
symbol? You know, in Greek it's
"ichthus." If you're a
woman, you may have an ichthus necklace. If
you're a man you might have an ichthus necklace, too. . .
(We may want to talk . . .) But
if you've got your ichthus necklace, each of those Greek letters stands for
something about Jesus. The letters
of ichthus--have you heard that Greek word before?
No? You ichthyologists, I
know, have. The fish symbol
originally--in Greek, they took the letters that spelled "fish" and
had them stand for "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior."
And in the non-Jewish setting communication of the gospel, Son of
God was the much more easy to communicate description.
Nevertheless, the two were always held together and were very, very
important. And so we have it in our
text this morning. We have both of them surfacing.
Jesus is saying, "When the Son of Man is lifted up, like Moses
lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, then everyone who believes in Him is
going to have eternal life." When
the Son of Man, the hoped-for Messiah, dies on the cross, then eternal life is
going to be made available. Why is
that? Well, it's because God so
loved the world that He sent His Son that whosoever believes in Him would have
eternal life. Eternal life is
associated with Jesus Christ as Son of God.
Eternal life is associated with Jesus Christ as Son of Man.
And if you want to understand Jesus the way that the Bible presents
Him, then we need to have both of those things.
One sort of calls our attention to the preparation that God undertook
with the chosen people down through the centuries.
The other calls our attention to the fact that you don't have to be a Jew
to appreciate Jesus. Anyone who can
understand the idea of God's Son, again, not in terms of gender, but in terms of
inheritance, and that's not that difficult to explain in most cultures.
God sending His Son, the one who is the inheritor of everything that God
has, and who is prepared to share all of it with everyone who believes in Him,
you can have eternal life. Now, neither of those designations may be easy to understand in the
American context. Neither one.
And, looking at our passage it says, verse 17: Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world
to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. The church is not called upon to have bad news, but good news.
Do you understand? The
church is not called upon to bring people into shame and condemnation, but to
free people from shame and condemnation. And
let's just pause for a minute and underscore that point before we move on. The way to be a stellar Christian is not to wander around
feeling guilty all day. I know
that's what some of us like to do. We
like to walk around and say, "You know what?
I know that I'm a really good Christian because of how bad I feel all the
time. Some people feel guilty in
the morning. Some people feel
guilty in the evening. But I am
such a good Christian, I feel guilty all day long!"
No. That's not what
Christians are called to. Christians
are called to be set free. We're
not called to be purveyors of bad news, guilt, and shame, and condemnation.
We're called to bring good news. And
we're not called to set hurdles in front of people so that they can't understand
who Jesus is. Now, then. That brings
us sort of, OK, present time, where there may not be widespread in American
society an ease of appreciation either of Son of Man or of Son of God.
And so we might ask, maybe we should just jettison the Son of God title.
You know, it was not the first thing that the original evangelists
preached. They knew that people
wouldn't appreciate what Son of God meant.
Well, why don't we just sort of forget Son of Man, Son of God--why don't
we throw out all of those and make up our own new things for Jesus today, so we
can have Reimagining conferences. And
when we have Reimagining conferences, what are we going to reimagine?
Well, we're going to reimagine God, and we're going to reject all of the
old ways that God was ever seen. Now, that's widespread either explicitly in American culture or
implicitly. We are a culture that
does not readily appreciate very much from the past. And in particular, does not have a ready ability to
understand what's at stake if Jesus is described as Son of Man, nor if Jesus is
described as Son of God. So let's
just take one example, but it's certainly not the only place that this surfaces.
But, you know, among feminists today there is a repudiation of anything
that would have "Son" in it, so "Son of Man"--no.
"Son of God"--no. Because
of the gender issue. And I tell you, I get to go around to different Presbyterian
churches and I know that there are people when they pray the Lord's Prayer, you
know, they say, "Our . . ." and they can't say the second word of the
Lord's Prayer. Now, I don't peek
during the praying of the Lord's Prayer, but if I did, I know--and there may be
some of us, you are in that situation, you won't pray the second word of the
Lord's Prayer because of feminist concerns about the "Fatherness" of
God, the "Sonness" of Jesus. I was an Interim Pastor at a church where, when I began as their
Interim, at the front of the sanctuary in place of where our cross is, there was
a very large "motherhood of God" banner right up there.
Couldn't miss it. First thing you see when you walk into the church.
Now it wasn't there when I left . . . and we won't tell you the story
about that this time. But we know
that there are concerns at the present time about issues like this.
And I'm convinced that the reason that the feminist arguments have gone
as far as they have gone is because they have been set forward in a cultural
context where nothing of the past is valued, nothing of the past is cherished,
so when a feminist says, "I want to just reject everything from the past
that I think is paternalistic," it's an argument set forward at a time when
people really can't think of any reason to honor anything from the past anyway.
That's American culture at present. So I want to challenge that just in one very, very simple way.
This may not be conclusive to some of you, but I ask you to just ponder
it. And the way that I want to
challenge it is this: The time to
jettison everything from the past (if there ever is a time), it would not be
when the culture at hand is the most superficial culture the world has ever
seen. That's not the time to get rid of important categories from
the past. And I submit to you,
wherever you fall on the theological scale, isn't it obvious that American
society at present, the American culture that we all know--this is among the
least profound, among the most superficial cultures that the world has ever
seen. You know that I'm right.
And so I say, is this the time to let go of things that have been very,
very important in the past? I
submit no, it's not. We need those
categories from earlier days to orient us because if we don't have those, the
only things that are going to percolate up in American society left to its own
devices are going to be . . . (I was going to say "useless."
I won't say "useless.") . . .
They're just USELESS! The Jesus Christ that is given to us by American culture--we see it
in Jesus Christ Superstar. Jesus is
a rock star. Now, how much is that
going to help you in your life? Or
in Godspell, Jesus is a clown. Or
in any of the other, you know, portrayals of Jesus that are strictly American as
America is left to its own devices. What
we see is a culture bereft of an appreciation for depth and significance.
So I'm going to challenge you: Is
this the time to let go of those ways that people have oriented themselves with
respect to ultimate issues in the past? Now I can ask that because I believe that the Bible is God's gift
to us. I believe that God gave it
to us to orient us in a world that sometimes is very very tinny, very very thin,
very very superficial. And God
doesn't want us to be thin and superficial people.
You know, I can bring this challenge because I believe that God
wants us to understand that Jesus Christ is the one who fulfills all of the
chosen people's messianic longings, but more than that, that Jesus Christ is
also God the Son, co-equal with the Father, incarnate in a baby born in
Bethlehem. And I'm just saying even
if you don't believe that yet, ask yourself, "Is American society as I know
it liable to come up with anything better?" I don't think so. So
I'm going to invite you to look again at what the Bible says.
Look again at what the Bible says because what America says is not likely
to be an improvement. That doesn't settle the issue, but I'm just challenging you:
Look again. What the Bible
says is the Son of Man, is the Son of God, is the Savior of the world.
Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for your Word which is the light
in darkness. Lord, we ask that you
would give us a chance to look again at what your Word reveals to us about the
Son of Man who is the Son of God. And
it's in His strong name that we pray. Amen. The Rev. Dr. Will Eisenhower Interim Pastor Faith Presbyterian Church Minnetonka, Minnesota [Transcribed from an audiotape of the
10:45 a.m. worship service on December 21, 2002.] |
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