Alternative is despair, or hope against hope

How can we today understand who Jesus Christ is and what he means for us? Like Christians in all times, in our search for an answer we must first turn to the evidence of the Gospels.
We have seen, however, that the Gospels do not just tell us who Jesus was during his earthly life, and what he said and did; they are also testimony to his identity in the Christian communities of the time. In other words, they are testimony not only to the earthly Jesus. but to the Christ who rose from the dead and is present now.
To hear witness to the earthly Jesus alone would make no sense for faith, because from a purely human point of view his message and his claim were disproved on the cross. His death is not only a sign that no human life can reach fulfiln)ent in this world. It was the killing of an innocent man who had relied on God as no one else had ever done and had championed men in the name of God. At first sight the Cross of Jesus opens up an abyss of meaninglessness and destruction.
There is only one alternative, despair or hope against hope. The Cross points back to Jesus' message and claim. If he, who claimed to be God's representative, died on the Cross, it would seem that God either did not confirm his claim or did not have the power to do it. If this is so. all the hopes which were based on God as a result of Jesus end in despair.
But anyone who hopes against hope (Rom 4: 18), and in spite of this end accepts Jesus and his claim that through him God identified himself with men even to the point of sharing their failures, can only do so reasonably if he is sure that God maintained and confirmed his loyalty to Jesus and his work, and through him to an men, even in Jesus' death.
We have seen that the claim that Jesus rose from the dead has precisely the function of in viting us to believe this. Both then and now, only one thing gives any point to our bothering about Jesus and believing in him, his message. his claim and his mission, and that is belief in his resurrection. The start and the heart of faith in Christ in all ages has been the belief that the man who was once crucified is alive now.
The claim that Jesus rose from the dead is not a supplementary article of faith, additional to Jesus' message and work during his life. The statement or his resurrection is what brings this message and work into operation. It makes the Kingdom of God in love present in human history in a new and permanent way. If we ask how it is' present, Scripture's answer is the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit who makes the person and work of Jesus, God's Kingdom in love permanently present in history.
We can now sum up the essence of the Christian message as follows. Faith in Jesus Christ reveals the identity of God and his importance to men in a way which is revolutionary in comparison to all other ideas. It reveals him as the one who is free in his love and loves in his freedom.
Starting, as we have done, From the Cross and resurrection as the centre of the Christian Faith enables us to understand in a new and deeper way what it means when the New Testament itself, followed by the creeds of the early Church, calls Jesus "Son of God" and "true God and true man in a single person".
We need not be troubled by the Fact that the christology of the early Church is more interested in the incarnation than
in the Cross and resurrection. Jesus' obedience even to the Cross shows us the attitude which dominated his whole earthly life. He surrendered himself completely to the control of God's love and thereby became — in another phrase of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's — "the man for others". In giving himself to God for men, Jesus wanted to be nothing in himself or for himself, but everything in God and for God, and everything for men. This twofold gift of himself to God and men consumed his life to its end. Through it his human sacrifice and human obedience became nothing less than God's visible love for men, the instrument God used to make his love present in the world. We can therefore say that by letting himself be totally taken over by God's love and opening himself completely to it. Jesus becomes in his own person the form in which the Kingdom of God's love exists for us.
This is what is meant by the Christian creed's description of Jesus as the "eternal Son of God", and not anything similar to the myths of ancient religions. It says that in his human openness to God and men he is the personified love of God. His words, actions, sufferings and signs are the words,. actions, sufferings and signs of God's love in him. Scripture talks more about the function of Christ, the later tradition of the creeds more about his nature. But "functional christology" and "nature christology", as they are often C lied today, are not opposites. '1.. ay represent different stages, and different legitimate approaches, within Christian tit' aught.
l'he statements about the function of Christ always include statements about the nature and person of Christ, whether or not these are made an explicit part of the theory. The confession that Jesus is the Son of God and that in him God himself approaches us says something about both the function and the nature of Christ.
We can now also understand quite easily what the other old definitions mean when they refer to Jesus as "true God and true man in one person". The freedom of God in his love, with which we come into contact in Jesus Christ. and the freedom of the man Jesus in his gift of himself do not exist side by side in isolation. and still less does either restrict the other. The divine element in Jesus does not reduce his human awareness or his human freedom.
Nor does his human autonomy threaten his union with God. The situation is the opposite: the unity of God and man in Jesus is complete because God and man remain God and man without restriction. It is because Jesus let himself be taken over by God in complete human openness and surrender that God and his love became a person in Jesus. The statement "Jesus is true God and true man in one person," is therefore a commentary on the statement "Jesus is the Son of God."
This is the third of four extracts from the historymaking COMMONCATECHISM, published this week at £5.50 by Search Press, Limited.