In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you.
—Jesus
John’s Gospel moves from the face-to-face relationship of the Father and Son to the astounding event of the Incarnation. The One who is in the bosom of the Father,1 was loved before the foundation of the world,2 and is himself God,3 became flesh and dwelt among us.4 The development of the vision of the Trinity through the first centuries of the early Church both clarified John’s thought and focused the attention upon his stunning insight. Jesus was not merely an exceptional man who achieved an unusually close relationship with God; he is the Father’s eternal Son who shares life and all things with him in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. And he became one of us, a human being. He is the incarnate Son.
The accent falls on the Father’s eternal Son stooping to become what we are. Jesus’ life on earth was the living out of his eternal relationship with his Father and with the Holy Spirit as a human being in our midst, in our space-time world. It was not simply God—an amorphous, monolithic abstraction—who became human, but God, the eternal Son of the Father. And he did not leave his relationship with the Father or the Holy Spirit behind when he became flesh. The Incarnation is the coming of the trinitarian life. In Jesus, Papa says, “we became fully human” (101). “Even though we have always been present in this created universe, we now became flesh and blood” (101). The triune life of God is now no longer only divine. It is divine and human.
Who is not stunned to silence by such an act of love and humility? The Creator became a creature. He who knows the Father became human. The One who enjoys the Holy Spirit in boundless love became a baby in Bethlehem, bringing the trinitarian life itself into our humanity. But there is more. There is another twist in the amazing tale.
The Incarnation, as Trevor Hart points out, was not “a temporary episode in the life of God.”5 The Son’s becoming human was not a quick visit to a friend’s house. The Incarnation will never end. It is an abiding reality now and forever. Stephen, the first martyr of the Church, got to see it first. Moments before he was stoned to death, Stephen gazed into heaven and was given to see the most astonishing reality in the universe:
But being full of the Holy Spirit, he gazed intently into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God; and he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened up and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”6
It wasn’t an angel or archangel that Stephen saw. It was the “Son of Man.” He saw Jesus himself, the incarnate Son, at the Father’s right hand.
After Jesus’ resurrection and before he departed, he met with his disciples and spoke with them about the Holy Spirit:
And after He had said these things, He was lifted up while they were looking on, and a cloud received Him out of their sight. And as they were gazing intently into the sky while He was going, behold, two men in white clothing stood beside them. They also said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into the sky? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in just the same way as you have watched Him go into heaven.”7
The ascension of Jesus is to me even more shocking than the stooping of God to enter our world. Perhaps in our wildest dreams we could almost understand God becoming human for a short while to work out our salvation, but who can understand the ascension of the incarnate Son?8 For it means that the Son’s becoming human is not a past event, but an ongoing reality. The humanity of Christ was not a robe that he donned for a season but has now taken off and put away in a heavenly closet. “I came forth from the Father and have come into the world; I am leaving the world again and going to the Father.”9 Jesus sits now, as a human being, at the Father’s right hand, knowing his Father in the fellowship of the Spirit.
Like most parents, I loved my children before they were actually born. But my love for them, and their love for me, is a relationship that grows and develops through time. We are human. It takes time for our love and relationship to mature, although our love in all its fullness was present from the very beginning. It helps me to recognize that the Incarnation is not to be confused with the virgin birth of Jesus. The Incarnation stretches, as it were, from Jesus’ miraculous conception through his life into his death, resurrection, and ascension. It is a movement of becoming.
At every moment Jesus is the Father’s Son and the Anointed One, and he is loved and loves, yet their relationship is ever new and ever expressing itself at each stage of his human development.10 Paul Young speaks of our freedom as “an incremental process” (97). The Incarnation, too, is a process in its own way. It is true at Jesus’ conception. He is the Father’s Son, but in our flesh he is always becoming who he is. Like the trinitarian life in eternity, the relationship of the Father and Son in the Spirit is always a life of love and oneness, yet in the Incarnation it grows and develops as we do.
If we could take a slice of any moment of Jesus’ life, we would see that he is the Father’s beloved Son and he is the one anointed in the Holy Spirit. But such a relationship in our space-time world takes time to express itself. At no point is it less than it always was, any more than at any point do we love our children more than we did when we first heard their heartbeats. The Father’s Son becoming human involves his whole life and finds its completion in his bodily ascension to the Father’s right hand.11 “Seated with the Father” is the truth of who Jesus is, having become what he always was as the eternal Son, but now as a human being. It took time to fulfill his sonship in our human existence. It had to be lived out in our world and, as Irenaeus said, through every stage of our human existence.12 And it has. In Jesus’ ascension to the Father, the Incarnation reached the amazing fulfillment of what it was at conception. Now—and this is the most astonishing part—the Father’s Son incarnate is in his Father as a human being, even as he was throughout his life, but now it is forever.13 Such humility and grace and love are inconceivable to us. But so it is.
And there is more! The New Testament proclaims to us that Jesus is also the Creator of all things. As we hold together the three great truths of Jesus’ identity (he is the Father’s Son; he is the One anointed in the Spirit; he is the Creator), we begin to see the beautiful and staggering truth of the human race. Jesus’ early followers understood him to be involved in the original act of creation. This is not a side point or an obscure footnote; John, Paul, and the writer of Hebrews are emphatic:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him; and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men.14
For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.15
God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.16
For these three writers, everything in creation has come into being through the Father’s Son. Not a single atom or subatomic particle, star, animal, plant, or person has existence in and of itself; all things breathe christological air and are sustained every moment by Jesus himself. As Thomas Merton puts it, “All creatures, spiritual and material, are created in, through and by Christ… it is He Who sustains them in being. In Him they ‘hold together.’ Without Him they would fall apart.”17
Commenting on John 1:4 and the phrase “in him was life,” John Calvin writes, “The simple meaning is that the Word of God was not only the fount of life to all creation, so that those which had not yet existed began to be, but that His life-giving power makes them remain in their state. For did not His continued inspiration quicken the world, whatsoever flourishes would without doubt immediately decay or be reduced to nothing.”18
Following the apostles, both Merton and Calvin see that the entire creation was called into being through the Son, and that he continues to give existence and life to all things. Without him the whole of creation would instantly vanish, or “lapse back into non-existence,” to borrow a great phrase from Athanasius.19
In creating the universe, Jesus is not like a child blowing soap bubbles through a wand. Once the bubbles are formed they detach from the wand and float away on their own. The child is involved in their creation, she is in some sense their source, but once they are formed there is a disconnect and she is no longer involved in their continued existence at all. The New Testament, and thinkers like Merton and Calvin, insist that, unlike the child and her soap bubbles, the Father’s Son is involved in the continued existence of creation. Jesus is not a wand through whom we were blown into being and then disconnected, only to float away in our own lives. There is no disconnect: Jesus is the source of both our creation and our continued existence. This is a critical point, for it means that the Father’s Son has a relationship with all things prior to his becoming human:
Since he is the eternal Word of God by whom and through whom all things that are made are made, and in whom the whole universe of visible and invisible realities coheres and hangs together, and since in him divine and human natures are inseparably united, then the secret of every man, whether he believes or not, is bound up with Jesus, for it is in him that human contingent existence has been grounded and secured.20
Here we are a hairsbreadth from the greatest news in the universe, and from the mind-blowing glory of Jesus Christ as the center of all things.
The New Testament’s witness to Jesus leads to a revolution in human understanding of God as the blessed Trinity. It also leads to a revolution in our understanding of creation and of human existence as not separated from the triune God, but together with God in relationship forever.21 “How could it be otherwise when he who became incarnate in him is the very one through whom all worlds, all ages, were made?”22 In becoming human, then, Jesus did not divorce his Father or leave the Holy Spirit in heaven, nor did he break his relationship with all creation. In Jesus’ very existence, the shocking truth about God, creation, and humanity is being shouted to the cosmos. It would take thirty-three years, a horrible crucifixion, and a bodily resurrection and ascension to work out, but in the incarnate Son there is an astonishing coming together of the blessed Trinity and all creation—all fallen creation. The implications of Jesus’ identity are staggering. His existence as the incarnate Son means that you are included in the life of the Trinity. So am I; we all are. “By His doing you are in Christ Jesus.”23
To speak the name of Jesus Christ, biblically and in the tradition of the early Church, is to say, “Father’s eternal Son,” and it is to say, “Holy Spirit anointed,” and it is to say, “Creator and Sustainer of all things”; and thus the very name of Jesus says, “The triune God, the human race, and all creation are not separated but together in relationship.” Jesus is the relationship. In his own being, the Father, the Holy Spirit, and all creation are together.
This means that the mutual indwelling of the blessed Trinity now includes us! In Jesus, the human race has been gathered into the Holy Spirit’s world. Adam’s fallen race has been embraced by Jesus’ Father and made his children forever. In Jesus, the love and joy, the fellowship and shared life, the staggering oneness of the blessed Trinity, have found us in our shacks—us: you, me, all of us—forever. In Jesus, “Papa has crawled inside of your world to be with you” (167).
“Mack,” said Papa with an intensity that caused him to listen very carefully, “we want to share with you the love and joy and freedom and light that we already know within ourself. We created you, the human, to be in face-to-face relationship with us, to join our circle of love.” (126)
I fear that we in the West have been so preoccupied with guilt and sin as to have missed the astonishing fact that the Father’s Son himself, the Anointed One and the Creator, has crossed all worlds to be with us and to include us in his life. Just the other day I heard a preacher on the radio holding forth about our need to receive Jesus into our lives. I could not help but be struck by how odd it sounded. When did any of us pray to receive our parents into our lives, or call our children to receive us into theirs? At its best, the preacher’s call was a worthy plea for his listeners to walk with Jesus, to be his disciples, to give themselves to participate in Jesus’ life. At its worst, it was a betrayal of the truth. The gospel is not the news that we can receive Jesus into our lives. The gospel is the news that Jesus has received us into his.24
When I was a student of Professor James B. Torrance back in the late eighties, a fellow student, Dan Price, told of seeing a little boy being hugged by his dad in the airport, and how it spoke to him of the Father-Son relationship. A week or so later the scene was replayed for me in dramatic fashion. I was reading the newspaper in the Aberdeen airport, waiting for my brother, who was coming for a visit from the States. Of the many people scurrying about, I happened to notice a dark-haired young man in his mid- to late thirties.25 He was nervous, walking back and forth between the terminal door and the Arrivals monitor every five minutes or so. At length he smiled, let out a sigh of relief, and relaxed, positioning himself thirty feet in front of the terminal doors in the middle of a group of others.
As I put the paper down to watch, the doors flew open and a few folks hustled through. Then there was a steady stream of people, some all but running to catch a flight, some not sure which way to go next, some smiling, obviously thrilled to be back home in Scotland. The crowd began to disappear, and the dad began to look anxious. Then it happened. A brown-haired little boy of about eleven appeared by himself in the doorway.
Standing perfectly still, he scanned the crowd like an alarmed deer. I heard his dad shout something, probably his son’s name, but I couldn’t tell for sure. But the boy heard his father’s voice and started running across the airport. To me it seemed like everything in the airport went into slow motion, and I had the perfect seat to watch it. The little boy’s eyes were full of delight as he ran. His dad just stood there with a huge smile on his face. No parent or grandparent could have watched without tears.
In one motion the boy dropped his bag and jumped as his dad embraced him. They kissed each other and cried. They laughed. But mostly they just held each other. It was a simple, beautiful embrace. Watching through tears in my own eyes, I heard these words whispered to me: “Baxter, Baxter, there is the gospel. There is the resurrection and ascension of my Son coming home from the far country. There is our embrace. And the good news is, he is not alone, he has you and the whole world with him.”
I tell this story everywhere I go, even when I return to virtually the same group; I suppose I am forever processing the meaning of such a moment and its message. But I knew instantly that I had seriously underestimated Jesus. As a typical American, I was an individualist. I had always believed that Jesus was the Son of God and that he became a human being, but I thought of him as an individual who did something for us. I had not seen—even though Professor Torrance was telling us so fifty times a day, in his great phrase “the vicarious humanity of Christ”—that in Jesus something happened not only for us, but to us and with us.
For while Jesus Christ is a human being, he is human as the One in and through and by and for whom all things were created and are constantly sustained. He is “the Man,” the one in whom we live and move and have our being.26 What becomes of him is not of peripheral significance for his creation. If Jesus were the Lone Ranger or perhaps the Marlboro Man, he could ride into the sunset and not much more than a little dust would be disturbed. But he is the Creator. If he rides into the sunset, he takes the dust and the ground, the earth and the sky, the sun and the moon with him. If the human race fell in a mere man named Adam, what happened to us in the life and death of the incarnate Creator and Son of the Father?27 If the Creator dies, the creation has no way of continuing to be. If he goes down, we go down. And that is the astonishing truth the disciples of Jesus are trying to tell us.
The apostle reaches this conclusion: “One died for all, therefore all died.”28 For Paul, Jesus is not simply one among many men. He is the Creator and Sustainer of all things. What becomes of him is not back-page, small-print news; it carries cosmic significance. There and then in Jesus, the Creator, something happened not only for us, but also to us and with us. When the Father’s Son died, we died. In Jesus, every created person and thing—Adam, you, me, the alienated cosmos—was terminated, brought to an end.29 “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.”30 And then came Jesus’ resurrection. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Peter says, “who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”31 When Jesus rose, we rose. When he ascended to the Father’s arms, we, too, were lifted up and embraced by the Father in him, and given a real place in his anointing in the Spirit.32
Read carefully the apostle Paul’s beautiful statement:
But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.33
This is astonishing news. Think about it. Paul is telling us that we were made alive with Jesus, and lifted up and seated with him at the Father’s right hand. F. J. Huegel sums it up by putting these words into Jesus’ mouth: “The old man is crucified; I take him with me to the tomb and, as I rise, it is you who rise in me. As I ascend to the Throne it is you who ascend with me. You are a new creation. Henceforth your life shall flow from me and from my Throne.”34
One year in Australia, I told (or retold) the story of the little boy in the airport at the end of a lecture. As I sat down I heard a young girl crying, “Mr. Kruger, Mr. Kruger,” as she ran down the aisle. Stephanie was her name, and as she called mine, my heart sank, for I assumed I had said something that had upset her. She sat beside me in tears. As I hugged her, I asked, “Stephanie, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong, Mr. Kruger.”
“Why are you crying?” I asked.
“When you told your story of the little boy in the airport, the Lord gave me a vision.”
“What did you see, Stephanie?”
“I saw God on a throne, and there were steps everywhere leading up to him. And there were heaps of people all over the steps. We were all trying to get to God, but none of us could make it; we were all bruised and cut, our knees were bloody, and we were all exhausted and sad and crying because we could not make it to God.”
“That is sad,” I said. “Did you see anything else?”
“Then I saw Jesus.”
“And what did Jesus do?”
“Jesus walked over to us, gathered us all into his arms, and walked up the steps and sat down in his Father’s lap.”
We sat silent for a moment in the beauty of that vision. I gave her a kiss on the cheek and whispered, “Stephanie, that is the gospel.”
Between the little boy and his father in the airport, and Stephanie’s vision of Jesus taking us to his Father’s lap, we have a beautiful picture of the staggering gospel of the triune God. As Lewis puts it,
He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world with Him. One has the picture of a strong man stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath some great complicated burden. He must stoop in order to lift, he must almost disappear under the load before he incredibly straightens his back and marches off with the whole mass swaying on his shoulders.35
In Jesus himself, through his incarnate life, death, resurrection, and ascension, the human race and all creation were taken down and lifted up into union with his Father and the Holy Spirit, included in the trinitarian life itself. Jesus has prepared a place for us all in the Father’s dwelling.36