Second Sunday of Year A
January 2008
As we saw last Sunday it wasn’t anything that Jesus did or said during his life that convinced his followers that he was ‘The Christ’ or ‘the Son of God’ the ‘Second Person of the Holy Trinity.’ It was the experience of ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ the Risen Lord that brought them to belief. This was the engine, the force, the Spirit that propelled and compelled them to preach Jesus of Nazareth, Crucified and Risen from the dead, and enabled them to give their lives willingly and happily for this cause.
As time passed and the number of believers grew, naturally, people wanted to know more about Jesus of Nazareth, such as what happened before his Resurrection, and then before his Crucifixion, and then during his two to three years preaching the Good News of the Kingdom of God, and then how and why he started to preach, and then how he was when he was growing up, and then who his parents were and how and where he was born, and then about his conception.
All this was of absolutely no importance to the ones who had actually experienced the Risen Lord. But they would constantly be asked to supply more and more details about the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth. None of the Apostles considered such details as important and actually knew very little about Jesus up to the point when they met him. But some of their followers remembered the answers they gave when asked, or wrote down what they heard from the Apostles and other disciples who actually knew Jesus. They sometimes drew on Old Testament prophesies to fill in the gaps. Thus a body of written and oral tradition grew up and was circulated among various Christian Communities.
This body of oral and written tradition was what was later used by the authors of the four Gospels to illustrate, and flesh out, their varying understandings of what the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth meant to them.
This is why one strand of New Testament theology has Jesus not knowing that he was the Son of God until the Resurrection.
And another strand of New Testament theology has Jesus knowingly living out what He and his Father had planned from the beginning of time.
This would appear to be contradictory but when dealing with the things of God (who is infinite) both, apparently contradictory views, can be true.
Another example would be; that we are saved by the life death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, but we must work out our salvation during our lives here on earth, and will finally be saved on the ‘Last Day’ when God gathers all things to Himself.
These three different ways of looking at salvation, or three different theologies of salvation, though apparently contradictory, are nevertheless all true.
Another example are the phrases ‘Kingdom of God’ and ‘Kingdom of Heaven.’
The first is used 53 times in the Gospels and the latter 31 times. The two phrases mean, more or less, the same thing but because they are trying to describe, in human words, what relates to the Infinite God (an impossible task) they use 84 different examples, parables and descriptions; some of which can sound contradictory.
In short, the New Testament is trying to explain in words, what is basically unexplainable in human terms.