Birth, Death, and Becoming Like God: Reflections on a New Testament Theme
The image of birthing and birth is important in the New Testament. There is of course the birth of Jesus, which we celebrate at Christmas as the incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity. There is also the famous image of new birth, or birth from above, in John 3, where Jesus uses a word that can mean both “again, anew” and “from above” to convey the nature of coming to faith in Jesus and entering the kingdom of God: “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again/from above” (John 3:3; some translations use “born again,” some “born from above.”) This image may, in turn, reflect the prophetic hope of a renewed people, a people given such new life that they could be described as having become like bones raised from the dead, an almost equally famous image from Ezekiel 37:
Then [the Lord God] said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord. (Ezek 37:4–6)
The gospel of John links these two births—the incarnation of God’s Son and the rebirth of God’s people—in the very first chapter:
[T]o all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John 1:12–14)
In other words, one important way to understand the birth of Jesus is to focus on its purpose of birthing a people—of creating a body of people who, individually and together, believe in and follow Jesus as the Son of God, thereby also becoming (in a different yet similar way) God’s children. The birth of Jesus was also intended to give birth to the church, the assembly of God’s children who name Jesus as God’s Son and as their elder brother—the body of Christ, or “Christians”—little Christs, as Martin Luther said in his famous treatise “The Freedom of a Christian,” describing how we should be in the world.
It is important for Christians in the West to think through some of the implications of Jesus’ birth and its purpose(s) for salvation and for the church. When considering salvation, our brothers and sisters in the Eastern churches (especially Orthodox Christians) have historically focused more on the incarnation, while we in the West (Protestant and Catholic) have focused more on Jesus’ death. The Orthodox draw especially on some of the church fathers who said of the incarnation: “God (or Christ) became what we are so that we could become what God (or Christ) is.” Such sentences may be found especially in the writings of Irenaeus (Second century) and Athanasius (Fourth century).
This thought may be jarring at first to Westerners, who are prone to want to keep God and humanity apart since God is the creator, and we are the creatures. We are fine with being God’s reborn children, but we are not God. But Athanasius and Irenaeus knew these truths, too. They did not mean to blur the lines between creator and created, but rather held that God has become one of us in order that we might become like God in discrete ways. The Seventh century Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor described this reality of transformation into God’s likeness with the image of placing an iron sword in a fire, such that it remains an iron sword but also takes on certain properties of the fire—light and heat—by “participating” in it. The word the church uses for this participation in God is theosis (deification)—the process of becoming like God, sharing in God’s “properties,” especially God’s love, holiness, and immortality. Great Western Christian theologians have also written about theosis, from Augustine to Wesley to Bonhoeffer.
In summary: the birth of Jesus means the birth of Jesus’ people: a family of sisters and brothers who know, love, and follow their elder brother and in that process become like God.
How Jesus’ Death Relates to the Atonement, Pentecost, and the Spirit
The most basic answer to the question of Jesus’ death is, ironically, that Jesus’ death also gives birth to the church. The incarnation and the atonement are critical moments, like bookends, in a long Jesus-narrative. They are closely connected, and each of them is also linked closely to Jesus’ life. Jesus did not come simply to be born and to die, as some think. Christmas and Easter are important, but so is everything in between. Jesus became one of us in order to inaugurate the kingdom of God and to change peoples’ perspectives and expectations, and he did that throughout his ministry. It is precisely because of his actions that he was crucified as a threat to the religious and political status quo.
In our Methodist tradition we have a lovely prayer in some communion liturgies: “By the baptism of his [Jesus’] suffering, death, and resurrection, you [God] gave birth to your church, delivered us from slavery to sin and death, and made with us a new covenant by water and the Spirit.” In other words, if Jesus was born to give birth to the church, he also died to give birth to the church.
The implications of the connection between incarnation and atonement in the birthing of the church are significant. If the incarnation shows us the extent and the shape of God’s love in the Son of God humbling himself to become one of us, then the atonement (Jesus’ death) shows us the extent and the shape of God’s love in the Son of God similarly “emptying himself”—spending himself fully—for us. St. Paul makes this connection in his poem preserved in the letter to the Philippians:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. (Phil 2:5–8)
As the Methodist liturgy says, it was this act that gave birth to the new covenant. The term “new covenant” is derived from the prophetic tradition, especially Jeremiah 31:31–34. In Ezekiel and elsewhere, Jeremiah’s promised internalization of God’s law in the people’s hearts is interpreted as the giving of God’s Spirit (Ezek 11:19, 36:27, 37:14). That is why Christians affirm that, as people of the new covenant, they have God’s Spirit in a unique way. And since that Spirit, according to Acts 2, was poured out on Pentecost, Christians can also refer to Pentecost as the birthday of the church. From incarnation to Pentecost, the church is born.
At Christmas, then, we celebrate the birth of Jesus, but also the birth of the church. In doing so, we remember that as people of the New Testament (= new covenant), we are indebted to Jesus’ birth, life, death, and Spirit for our own birth and our ongoing life. We demonstrate that we are God’s reborn people when we allow the love of our incarnate and crucified Lord to shape us day by day, for it is he who shows us what it means to be born again as God’s children and to share in God’s likeness by the power of the Spirit. He became what we are so that we could become what he is: self-giving love. And that involves a sort of dying which is, paradoxically, life-giving. The Prayer of St. Francis says it well:
O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
