Jesus vs. Generic God - Christianity Today

Shortly after September 11, a preacher told me about seeing a couple interviewed on TV. In great grief, they had just lost their beloved adult daughter on that terrible Tuesday. The reporter, perhaps trying to find a way to wrap up the conversation, said, “Well, er, I guess you’ll be going to your place of worship this weekend to receive some consolation.”

The mother replied, “No. You see, our religion teaches that we ought to forgive our enemies. And we are just not ready for that right now.”

Now there was a woman who knew something of the perils of worshiping a God whose name is Trinity, who has come to us as a Jew from Nazareth named Jesus.

When lecturing on preaching to fellow pastors, I have sometimes told them, “Some of your homiletical failures are not your fault. Many of your failed sermons are due to Jesus. You have some tough material with which to work!”

In debates on campus, in order to put a point on this issue of divine particularity, I have said, “Christians don’t believe in ‘god.’ We believe that Jesus Christ is God.” That affirmation makes us—in a world of generic, fuzzy contemporary gods—peculiar.

After the September 11 disaster, I heard a professor of Islamic studies say on TV, “Well, after all, Christians and Muslims both worship the same God.” In a divided America, there are understandable political reasons for hoping that were the case. However, I’ve read a fair amount of the Qur’an, and I find vast amounts of material there that would not fit into the mouth of Jesus under any circumstances, no matter how much we need to get along with Muslims.

Of course, Muhammad is not thought to be the only begotten Son of God (an idea abhorrent to Islam). But he is believed to be a perfect revelation of the true God.

Muhammad was a righteous warrior. Jesus died without defending himself, died forgiving his enemies (us). Between these two definitions of “God” there is a great gulf that cannot be bridged by well-intentioned attempts to jettison all of those troubling peculiarities that make Muhammad almost nothing like Jesus. To do so would be unfair to Islam, to say nothing of what it would do to Christianity.

Preaching a particular God

We preachers cannot get around the central Christian claim that, when we look at the life and teachings of this Jew from Nazareth who was born of a woman, lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly, we have seen much of God as we ever hope to see.

The current age is a particular challenge for preaching a particular God who is manifest to us in Jesus the Christ. For some time now, we have been in the mire of something called “spirituality,” which in my experience tends to be decidedly anti-traditionalist, anti-institutional, amorphous, vague and therefore undemanding.

Spirituality is what I feel when I feel better than I did before I felt it. It is a big, accommodating basket into which I can put almost anything I want to feel about the “higher power,” or “spiritual force,” or “my own little voice,” or whatever I call whatever it is that makes me feel better.

Just for now, I’m trying to discipline myself, whenever I hear someone around here say “spirituality,” to think “idolatry.”

The trouble is, Jesus is demanding. He is not infinitely pliable. True, there is a great deal that we do not know about Jesus, a great deal left unsaid by the Gospels. But there is also a great deal that we do know that is undeniable, unavoidable, and troubling to our settled arrangements with the present order.

Years ago I heard theologian John Howard Yoder say that you can judge a theology by how often it talks about “God,” or even “Christ,” and how seldom it mentions Jesus. The Second Person of the Trinity is the ethical stuff of our faith, the unmalleable, resistant fact that gives God a face, a name, an undeniable contour, an unavoidable claim upon us.

Preachers are to preach that name, that contour, that claim, trusting the Holy Spirit to change our hearers, rather than attempting, by our homiletical skills, to make the Trinity more comprehensible to our hearers by scaling it down to “God.”

G.K. Chesterton once said something to the effect that it may be possible to have a good debate over whether or not Jesus believed in fairies. That could be a rather interesting argument. However, said Chesterton, there is no point to a debate over whether or not Jesus believed that rich people were in big trouble. There is just too much evidence.

In a world of nebulous spirituality and undemanding deity, we preachers must take care. We so desperately want a hearing, we so wish to be comforting, we so much would like to be helpful in bringing a frighteningly divided culture together, that we may be tempted to jettison the particular God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in favor of a more generic one of our own making.

In a generic God culture, we may be tempted to describe the faith as broad, universal, and unrestrictive. So we may preach an amorphous “love” without giving it the cruciform shape that makes Christian love possible—and so demanding. Or we may preach “compassion,” “possibility thinking,” “self-fulfillment,” or whatever vague virtues that culture may be in the market for at the moment.

We must trust Jesus enough to create the hearing that he deserves. Our job is to keep our preaching tied to its proper object—not the wishes and fears of the congregation—but rather the God who seeks and saves in the person of Jesus.

Any preacher knows that the power of a good story is in the concrete particularities. It is no good to offer an illustration that begins, “A man, or it could have been a woman, a young or an old person, was walking along a road, or perhaps a path, or even a superhighway, when all at once, this human being came upon a . …” The power of a story lies in the particularity.

“A man was going down the road from Jerusalem to Jericho where he fell among thieves who beat him, stripped him, and left him half dead.” That’s the way Jesus talks. In talking that way, with all of the concrete specifics, we are not only presented with a realistic story, but we are put in a real place, with real names.

The good news is thus allowed to take root among us, to be enacted where we live. The Incarnation is one of the main reasons why Jesus’ primary and most distinctive mode of communication appears to have been the parable.

Our challenge, as communicators of the gospel, is not that God was in Jesus but that God was in Jesus, reconciling the world to himself.

We cannot make this faith mean anything we want. There is mystery, room for wonder, doubt, disagreement. But there are also these nasty particularities that make the gospel unavoidably abrasive, discordant, and so very interesting.

Don’t hide the peculiarities

Rather than attempt to smooth out the rough places between us and the good news of Jesus Christ, we preachers (perhaps especially in the present moment) ought to accentuate the peculiarities, highlight the distance been our ways and God’s way, a distance that is not bridged by simply smoothing down the rough edges until we can’t tell the difference between the incarnate Son of God and (in Flannery O’Connor’s phrase) “our own sweet concoction.”

For me, this means the discipline of sticking as closely as I can to the stuff of the biblical text. Rather than reading a text, attempting to distill from the text some grand abstract generality (“God is love,” or “All the world’s people are family”) and preaching that, I want to marvel at the strange, unaccommodating, surprising peculiarity of the text.

I dare not render the peculiar less peculiar, but rather, our task is to enable the congregation to enjoy how very odd, and therefore how wonderfully engaging, is salvation as embodied in Jesus.

For instance, in just the past few weeks, in studying the Scripture in preparation for preaching, I have been delightfully surprised:

that when Jesus pronounces his Beatitudes in Matthew 5, he doesn’t tell anybody to do anything. He never says, “Go out and be peacemakers,” which is what I might have preached. He rather says “God blesses peacemakers.” It’s not in the imperative (which we Mother-I’d-rather-do-it-myself Americans love) but in the indicative.
that Jeremiah told suffering Israel, when they were in exile, that they were in exile because of their sin and infidelity. They had nobody to blame for their suffering but themselves. I thought preachers were supposed to be compassionate! What kind of compassion also deals in truth telling? As a pastor, I usually associate compassion with my efforts to protect people from the truth!
that when God Almighty chose to win back the world, to reveal himself in all of his glory, God did so as a Near Eastern male. Why did God choose that part of the world rather than New York?

Sermons are interesting that have something interesting to say. A generic, one-size-fits-all, fuzzy deity is not worth the effort. What is fascinating is to be stuck with a Savior who, upon meeting an upwardly mobile young man one day, looks upon him and, having “loved him,” tells him to go, sell everything he has, give it to the poor and “follow me.” Now that sort of story gives some interesting substance to the word “love.”

Again I say, the great, invigorating challenge for us preachers is not that Jesus was God, but that God was Jesus.