There’s this rumor, out in the world, about Jesus. It’s that he was a Great Teacher.
There’s another one, in which Jesus is the solver of your problems. He’s waiting for you to come to him, after which he’ll make your life run better.
And another, in which he’s a cute baby in a manger, and he cries when you shoplift. That’s the one we tell children.
Jesus never talked about himself as a great teacher. He said he was the Son of God. Nor did he promise that your problems will end if you follow him. He said frankly that the Way would be hard. (And notice, he himself had plenty of problems on earth.) Nor did he spend his life as a baby in a manger.
Let’s think about the cosmic Christ for a minute. Let’s dispel some hearsay, for the benefit of people who’ve heard about him but never read the words he had to say about himself. It isn’t like in Sunday School.
First, he didn’t come into being 2,000 years ago. He always was. Before Abraham, as he put it, ‘I am’. He remembered the fall of Satan (describing it like ‘lightning’). He saw the coming restoration of creation (admitting that even he didn’t know when it was going to be). The nature of God not changing, and he being ‘one with the Father’, he was present at creation itself. And here’s a corker: he was the very agent of creation. This is explicit in scripture, and we say it still every Sunday in the creed: this is Jesus, through whom all things were made. (Read that again, slowly.)
The Greeks were used to this. We are not. They conceptualised divinity, when they weren’t talking about Olympians, as a continuous originating source of being, unknowable and outside all creation, but effecting its creation through an intermediary, of one being with itself (words, again in our creed). They gave it vocabulary of ‘Urge’ and ‘Demiurge’. And that’s why metaphysicians like John, or even Paul, spoke of Jesus the way they did. Jesus was the ‘Word’, in the beginning, of the ineffable Creator, coextensive with him, and coeternal. This is the context in which Jesus made it clear that he never spoke on his own. He didn’t mean he was repeating sentences that he heard; he meant that he was (as we still say) of one being with the Father.
Thinking through what ‘the Father’ means, that makes one whopper of a Jesus.