What do we think God was up to in Jesus?

As I was preparing for this week, the podcast I listen to in preparation each week talked about the letter to the Hebrews offered several responses to the question, “what do we think God was up to in Jesus?” As I thought about that, I think we can add, and what does that say about God?  Big questions that are there every week. How we answer them shapes what we think about the life of faith, church, and the mission of God.

The people on the podcast suggest that Hebrews offers more than one answer to that first question. With Job, it encourages us to ask the question, and to hold lightly the answers we come to. We are reminded that our understanding of the nature and way of God is in the end limited and flawed. God is God. But they are still questions we need to reflect on.

As I have said many times, the gospels address these questions through the story of Jesus; what he said and did, the people he mixed with, and his death, resurrection, and ascension. To put that more simply, Jesus is like God and God is like Jesus. As this week’s passage (Mark 10: 32-45) reminds us, these gospels are quite subversive. Jesus teaches about his upcoming death, and Jams and John respond by wanting to join Jesus in his all-powerful glory. Because surely that is what is next. God is all powerful? They are tired of being on the wrong end of power and longed to be at the head of the table. Surely following Jesus meant they would be powerful people. And they are not alone. Christians have sought that ever since. We still do. It comes through  when we read Jesus talking about serving, we read that in terms of being servants for Jesus, with Jesus the all powerful one and we being subservient to our God. And we miss what Jesus is saying. We are not so different to James and John.

The gospels offer a powerless God who in love for creation and for all humanity dies as a nobody on a cross, the symbol of absolute rejection and humiliation. Jesus teaches this is God at work. In this story he teaches that the Human One (Son of Man) does not come to be served but to serve. (10.45) God is powerless. God serves. Do we talk about God in that kind of way? But that is what Jesus is saying, and we are invited to join with God in Jesus. In this way God is faithful and breaks the powers that hold creation ransom, and frees creation so that life in all its forms, sustained by love, can flourish in right relationship with God, each other, and all of creation.  So who is God and what do you think this God is up to in Jesus?