Thursday, May 7, 2009

Jesus is the One in Whom God Does God to us.

Jesus is the One in whom God does God to us, the true human in whom God does God to us.
The point is that we can move forward here only if we realize that in and through the human, suffering, dying, and resurrected Jesus we come up against God.
God does himself to us in Jesus.
The PROCLAMATION is the concrete event in which that occurs for us…
It is in and through the humanity, the suffering and the dying of Christ, that we come up against what his divinity means.
He does not come to protect us from death, he comes to do it to us.
He brings death home to us.
He does old beings to death.
The suffering and dying Jesus is therefore the one in whom we meet our end, the eschatological end of our existence in bondage to sin and death.
He is the end of the old being who vainly constructs death-denying projects, who thinks that abstractions such as divinity and immortality can save.
He puts an end to our story negatively and positively.
He is the end (finis) of the old, and the goal (telos) of the new.
The old is put to death so that the new can be resurrected in faith and hope to look to the last day in confidence.
In the proclamation language of act, the divinity of Jesus consists in the fact that precisely through his suffering, death, and resurrection, HE DOES GOD TO US.
As John's Gospel has it, in the instance where Jesus gets into trouble for breaking the old order by healing on the Sabbath, the Son does what he sees the Father doing. Their unity is a unity of doing. "Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever he does, that the Son does likewise" (John 5:19).
He was, of course, killed for that, killed by the likes of us who did not want the old to end because we thought we could bring it to a better end ourselves.
But even in his dying, he does only what "he sees the Father doing" to the end.
As the one who actually dies, unprotected, rejected, forsaken, even by God, Jesus is "the end of us" as beings who thought divinity was a protection.
The crucifixion of Jesus is the end of us.
We cannot see through it.
There is nothing "godlike" here for old beings to recognize.
It is simply the end.
God is through with us as old beings.
There can be no survivors, no spectators.
The only way forward is through faith in the resurrection.
Thus Jesus is the repetition of God to us, because in the first place he is the absolute end of the old, the chaos of darkness, bondage, and sin.
He is the end of all the old being's hopes, dreams, and fantasies.
He shatters our godlike pretensions, even the possibility of finding them reinforced in his divinity.
And Jesus finally exposes why it is we have such difficulty surrendering the language of being and its surrogates.
Like the law, it is our last hope as old beings, our final defense as gods, against having to die.
Like Peter's "confession," it is our last line of defense against God.
If we could align Jesus on our side as the warranty for our divinity, then we would not have to say with Paul those shocking words, "For [Christ's] sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse (skubala), in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ.... that I may know him and the power of his resurrection (Phil. 3: 8-10).
Theology Is For Proclamation – G.O. Forde
The Preached God - Jesus: The Man in Whom God Does God – pp. 100-103

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