Not a God Like Me
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
The other day I heard someone opine that he was leaving Christianity not because he objected to the character of Jesus Christ, whom he held in the highest esteem, but because he felt that he needed a god who looked more like him. Upon further conversation, this person stated, in so many words, that he was seeking tribal gods, ethnic gods, local deities who emerged organically, naturally, from the stories of his people. And Jesus just wasn’t that for him.
His is a position with which I can sympathize, to a certain degree. Throughout the history of Christianity, Jesus has often been nationalized, and belief in Him imposed by unjust powers upon unwilling peoples. When the British Empire spanned the globe from Canada to Guyana, South Africa to Hong Kong, they brought along with them a very English Christ. To be a Christian, and to be an Englishman, were often conflated.
This was quite a reversal from earlier centuries, when Jesus was presented to each and every culture as one of them. In China and South Korea, depictions of the Christ appear like unto Confucius, with an aged East Asian sage nailed to the Cross. In the early 1600s, a Jesuit missionary in Canada penned the Huron Carol, an adapted Christmas story presenting the baby Jesus as born in a lodge of bark, wrapped in rabbit skins, and receiving gifts of fur and beaver pelt from the wise men.
Early Christian art depicts Christ as a Jew to the Jews, a Greek to the Greeks, and a Roman to the Romans. Medieval Italians infamously used one of their own warlords as the model for popular paintings of Jesus. In Northern Europe, Saxon skalds wrote epic poems such as the Heliand and the Dream of the Rood, in which Christ triumphs over the Cross as a Germanic warrior-poet.
At one point, newly baptized northern Christians imported crucifixes from the Mediterranean, only to be confused as to why an apparent bearded lady had been nailed to their crosses. Jesus’ southern tunic they mistook to be a dress. Christ had become, as St Paul had sought to be, all things to all peoples.
In the Incarnation, revealed on Christmas Day, God became for us fully, truly human: one of us in every way save sin. And this we sought to communicate, in preaching and song and art. Yes, a European Christ to Europe, an Asian Christ to Asia, an African Christ to Africa, never forgetting that these are all one and the same. In the words of the Roman poet Terence: “I am human. I find that nothing human is alien to me.”
And yet—Christ did not become some amorphous human archetype. We was born in a particular time and particular place to particular people. His Incarnation includes not only flesh and blood, not only mind and spirit, but also culture and religion and language and food. Jesus is a Jew, a first-century eastern Mediterranean rabbi. This we call the “scandal of particularity,” that is, the notion that God did not simply take on humanity in the abstract but specifically took on flesh as this one Man.
Herein lies not a contradiction but a paradox. To wit: those stories most grounded in the particular prove themselves the most universal. The Iliad is ancient Grecian through and through. A Christmas Carol is Victorian to its bones. And precisely because they are so enfleshed, so incarnate, so particular, we relate to them no matter who we are or when we live or whence we come. Jesus is this one person, with a mom and a dad and a home, and because of that He is all of us, all of humanity, bound up in the Body of Christ.
So it’s true that on one level Jesus doesn’t look like us, doesn’t sound like us, doesn’t think like us. You have to work to understand the Hebrew and the Greek. But for me this is a feature of faith and not a bug. I need a God whose face is not my own. I need to be reminded, all the time, that God is found in folks out there—who sound different and smell different and pray in ways that I do not. God is a brown boy born in Bethlehem. And that should rock us to our core.
Look, my ancestors were no angels. Even after Christianity, my family tree is littered with conquerors and killers. But before Christ—man, we used to slit people’s throats and hang them upside-down from trees, as offerings to Odin. My problem, speaking for myself, is not that I need a God who looks like me. I get a little too much of that already. I need a God who looks like other people, people who do not share my tribe’s ancestral gods of blood and soil.
I need a God who is constantly reminding me, by His Word and His Spirit, His Body and Blood, that other people are human; nay, that other people are divine. They are made in the Image of God. They are temples of God’s Spirit. I need to be pulled out of my culture: Western culture, European culture, American culture, pulled kicking and screaming to Bethlehem, under the boot of Roman occupation, under false kings and religious zealots and the banality of evil.
I need a faith that points to children, helpless useless powerless children, and cries, “Here! Here is God! Here is the Love who births all of Creation! Here is the Truth who sets all of us free!” And men who look like me, who think like me, will kill Him, in the worst way we know how, because by God we have made killing into an art. But even that will not stop Him, cannot stop Him, from loving us, from forgiving us, from calling us home.
No more blood and soil. No more death and hell. No more sin and condemnation. Come, O Lord Jesus. Come, O Emmanuel. Come and make it Christmas for us all.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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