Who is the Redeemer?

"For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." (1 Timothy 2:5)

Week 20 (from the New City Catechism, www.newcitycatechism.com)

Question: Who is the Redeemer?

Answer: The only Redeemer is the Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, in whom God became man and bore the penalty for sin himself.

*Cf. The Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 18; The Belgic Confession, Articles 10, 17-21.

            G.K. Chesterton once remarked that, “It has never been quite enough to say that God is in his heaven and all is right with the world; since the rumor is that God had left his heavens to set it right.” Into this broken, fallen, sinful world, he came. Not because we wanted him or knew we needed him…he came. While the joy and mystery grips some of us for a season, as Christmas gives way to the January blahs we forget…that God came to us. At the heart of the Christian story is the earth-shaking reality that the Creator of heaven and earth put on flesh and dwelt among us in the person of Jesus Christ, God-in-the-flesh. The New City Catechism, Heidelberg Catechism, Belgic Confession, Belhar Confession, Westminster Catechism, Luther’s Catechism, and just about every historical creed goes to great lengths to pronounce that the world is being reconciled to God…by Jesus Christ.

            For all of the differences within Christianity—conservative and liberal, traditional and progressive, white and black, small and large, missional and inward, high church and low church, suburban megachurch and neighborhood chapel, inclusive and exclusive—one thing is constant: Jesus Christ. Christmas, then, is not just an event, but the event. Christianity is not just a religion, but the religion. And, of course, it is really neither an event nor a religion at all…but a person. Jesus Christ.
In a Christmas sermon delivered long, long ago, the great preacher John Chrysostom said it this way:

"The Only Begotten, Who is before all ages, Who cannot be touched or be perceived, Who is...without body, has now put on my body, that is visible and liable to corruption. For what reason? The Ancient of days has become an infant. He Who sit upon the sublime and heavenly Throne, now lies in a manger. And He Who cannot be touched...now lies subject to the hands of men. He Who has broken the bonds of sinners, is now bound by an infants bands. But He has decreed that ignominy shall become honor, infamy be clothes with glory, and total humiliation the measure of His Goodness. For this He assumed my body, that I may become capable of His Word; taking my flesh, He gives me His spirit; and so He bestowing and I receiving, He prepares for me the treasure of Life. He takes my flesh, to sanctify me; He gives me His Spirit, that He may save me...For...the power of death is broken...the curse is taken away, sin is removed from us, error driven out, truth has been brought back...Why is this? Because God is now on earth."
(The Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers, Vol. 1)

Who is the Redeemer? Jesus Christ! And who is Jesus Christ? The eternal Son of God!

            So at the end of the day (and surely at the end of every life) the question that is posed to us is simply this: “What am I to do with Jesus?” Very few outside of mainstream Christian circles would put it so plainly or suggest this level of importance, but I do believe we are left with this as the question of the universe. And to be sure most everyone (at least in the Western Hemisphere) has an opinion about Jesus. For all of the nitpicking about theology and religion and for all of our timid claims on truth, it really does come down to this: What am I to do with Jesus?

            Prophet, peasant, teacher? Yeah, but this is far less than what Jesus claimed for himself. Moral exemplar, miracle-worker, Son of God? Surely not less than these, but also surely more. He is our Redeemer! This implies that we needed redeeming (the offense of our sin before God) and that he is able to redeem us (he is God-in-the-flesh). C.S. Lewis begins to capture it with one of my favorite quotes from Mere Christianity:

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

What will you do with Jesus? And what will that look like today?

Prayer

Our Saviour, dearly-beloved, was born today: let us be glad…Let the saint exult in that he draws near to victory. Let the sinner be glad in that he is invited to pardon. Let the Gentile take courage in that he is called to life. For the Son of God in the fullness of time…has taken on him the nature of [humanity], thereby to reconcile it to its Author: in order that the inventor of death, the devil, might be conquered through that which he had conquered. And in this conflict undertaken for us, the fight was fought on great and wondrous principles of fairness; for the Almighty Lord enters the lists with his savage foe not in his own majesty but in our humility, opposing him with the same form and the same nature, which shares indeed our mortality, though it is free from all sin.

(Leo the Great, from Sermon XXI, “Feast of the Nativity”)