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Page 24
_Communion with Jesus in God._ When the Christian through Jesus finds
himself in fellowship with His God and Father, he does not leave Jesus
behind as One whose work is done. He discovers that he can maintain this
fellowship only as he constantly places himself in such contact with the
historic Figure that God can through Him renew the experience. It is by
going back to Jesus that we go up to the Father; or rather, it is
through the abiding memory of Jesus in the world that God reaches down
and lifts us to Himself. And at such times no Christian thinks of Jesus
as a memory, but as a living Friend. To Him he addresses himself
directly in prayer and praise, which would be meaningless were there no
present communication between Jesus and His disciples.
We cannot say that we have an experience of communion with Jesus which
is distinguishable from our experience of communion with God; we respond
through Jesus to God. But if our God be the God of Jesus, we cannot
think of Jesus as anywhere in the universe out of fellowship with Him.
His God would not be Himself, nor would Jesus be Himself, were the
fellowship between Them interrupted; and we cannot think of ourselves
as in touch with the One, without being at the same time in touch with
the Other. It is an apparently inevitable inference from our Christian
experience, when we attempt to rationalize it, that "our fellowship is
with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ." In communion with God
we are in a society which includes the Father and all His true sons and
daughters, the living here and the living yonder, for all live unto Him.
They are ours in God; and Jesus supremely, because He is the Mediator of
our life with God, is ours in His and our Father.
We have already passed over into the division of our subject which we
called _the Christ of reflection_. All experience contains an
intellectual element, and we never experience "facts" apart from the
ideas in which we represent them to ourselves. But there is a further
mental process when we attempt to combine what we think we have
experienced in some relationship with all else that we know, and reach a
unified view of existence. For example, when Paul took the gospel out of
its local setting in Palestine, and carried it into the Roman world, he
had to interpret the figure of Jesus to set it in the minds of men who
thought in terms very different from those of the fishermen of Galilee
or the scribes at Jerusalem. Similarly John, who wrote his gospel for
Gentile readers, could not introduce Jesus to them as the Messiah, and
catch their interest; he took an idea, as common in the thought of that
day as Evolution is in our own--the Logos or Word, in whom God expresses
Himself and through whom He acts upon the world--and used that as a
point of contact with the minds of his readers. We have to connect the
Christ of our experience with our thought of God and of the universe.
Three chief questions suggest themselves to us: How shall we picture
Jesus' present life? How shall we account for His singular personality?
How shall we conceive the union in Him of the Divine and the human,
which we have discovered?
The first of these questions faced the disciples when Jesus was no
longer with them in the flesh. When a cloud received Him out of their
sight, it did not take Him out of their fancy; finding themselves still
in communion with Him, they had to imagine His present existence with
God and with them. They used their current symbol for God--the Most High
enthroned above His world--and they pictured Jesus as seated at the
right hand of the throne of God. Or they took some vivid metaphor of
personal friendship--a figure knocking at the door and entering to eat
with them--and found that a fitting interpretation of their experience.
These were picturesque ways of saying that Jesus shares God's life and
ours. While our current modes of representing the Divine do not localize
heaven, the symbolic language of the Bible has so entered into our
literature, that in worship and in devout thought we find the New
Testament metaphors most satisfactory to express our faith.
The second question was asked even during Jesus' lifetime--"Whence hath
this Man these things?" The New Testament writers deal with the question
of Jesus' origin in a variety of ways. The earliest of our present
gospels opens its narrative with the descent of the Spirit upon Jesus as
He answers John's summons to baptism. It seems to explain His
uniqueness by the extraordinary spiritual endowment bestowed upon Him in
manhood. The first and third gospels contain besides this two other
traditions: they introduce Jesus as the descendant of a line of devout
progenitors, going back in the one case to David and Abraham, and in the
other still further through Adam to God. They bring forward His
spiritual heredity as one factor to account for Him. Side by side with
this they place a narrative which records His birth, not as the Son of
Joseph through whom His ancestry is traced, but of the Holy Spirit and a
virgin-mother. This gives prominence to the Divine and human parentage
which brought Him into the world. In Paul and John and the _Epistle to
the Hebrews_, there is incarnate in Jesus a preexistent heavenly
Being--the Man from heaven, the Word who was from the beginning with
God, the Son through whom He made the worlds. They present us with a
Divine Being made a man. This last conception is not combined by any New
Testament writer with a virgin-birth. When our New Testament books were
put together, the Church found all four statements in its Canon, and
combined them (although some of them are not easily combined) in its
account of Jesus' origin.
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