Male difficulty in showing emotions wasn’t there from the beginning. It was something ishes learned over time. When the first ish was introduced to the ishah, what did Adam do? He started gushing with a gully-washer of emotions. His language made the first, stammering attempts at connection—“At last!”44 Was ish excited or what?
THE BROKEN RELATIONSHIPS
It was an idyllic existence for both human and divine. God’s favorite thing to do was walk in the garden with Adam and Eve “while the dew is still on the roses,” as the hymn writer put it.45 Ask any gardener when is the best time to walk a garden, and he or she will tell you the same thing: while the dew is still on the roses—early and dark (dawn) or late and light (dusk). These were the last Adam’s two favorite times of day, which He mostly spent in prayer. Prayer is walking in the garden with God.
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What is a charitable heart? Is it a heart which is burning with a loving charity for the whole of creation, for me, for the birds, for the beasts. . . . He who has such a heart cannot see or call to mind a creature without his eyes being filled with tears by reason of the immense compassion which seizes his heart: a heart which is so softened and can no longer bear to hear or learn from others of any suffering, even the smallest pain, being inflicted upon any creature. This is why such a man never ceases to pray also for the animals . . . pray even for the lizards and reptiles.
—ISAAC OF SYRIA ( SEVENTH CENTURY)46
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One day, God walked the garden—and Adam and Eve were nowhere to be found.
“Adam, Eve, it’s our time together. . . . Adam? Eve? Where are you?”
“We’re hiding.”
This was the first broken relationship of human existence: a broken relationship with God. We are all, in one form or another, hiding from our Maker.
“Why are you hiding?” God asked.
“We’re naked.”
This was the second broken relationship of human existence: a broken relationship with ourselves. We’re all wearing masks, facades, and trying to be something other than what God made us.
“Who told you you were naked? Why did you eat of that tree? I gave you thousands of trees and said, ’Eat freely. Go there.’ Only one tree I said, ’Don’t go there.’ Why did you disobey Me?”
Adam replied, “The woman You gave me made me do it.”
Eve replied, “The serpent made me do it.”
This was the third broken relationship of human existence: a broken relationship with each other, with the companions God has given us, human and animal. The great unresolved issue of the human species is this: how to get along with one another.
Then God banished the humans from the garden, which was the fourth broken relationship of human existence: a broken relationship with creation. Creation needed redemption; it was fallen, like the rest of us. From now on humans would not function in a paradigm of play, where vocation and vacation are synonymous, but a paradigm of work: “Eve, you’ll labor, and Adam, you’ll labor.” From now on, nature and humans would go their separate ways. In biblical Hebrew there is no word for “nature” because “nature” was not supposed to be something separate from us: we were created to be a part of it, and it a part of us. After the Fall, all creation joined humans in the trail and travail of brokenness, awaiting the day of its redemption.
To prevent Adam and Eve from returning to the garden, God posted great winged creatures called cherubim and their fiery, flashing swords to guard the gate to the Tree of Life.
THE REST OF THE STORY
The rest of the story, from Genesis to the genuine leather, is the story of God’s initiatives to repair and restore, redeem and mend those four broken relationships so as to bring humans back to God’s eternal purpose, which was in God’s heart from before the Fall. Thus the mission and purpose of God are not redemption, as is commonly taught. Redemption is the contingency program put in place to get us back to God’s purpose—a purpose that predated Adam’s fall into sin. Consequently, the history of humanity comprises three parallel stories:
• the story of God’s original purpose, which stands apart from the Fall and redemption—a purpose that God has never let go of
• the story of human attempts to find loopholes to avoid the legacy of the Fall
• the story of God’s various strategies for corralling humanity back through the gates of Eden
There is no event in history unrelated to these three stories.
God tried everything.
God tried a flood, which one Asian theologian calls “God’s tears.”47 God was so hurt by our rejection, stubborn rebelliousness, and refusal to be in a right relationship that God couldn’t stop crying.
God tried a covenant. Not just a covenant with Noah but a covenant with all creation, with “all flesh that is on the earth.”48 That’s why YHWH kept sending Moses back in his negotiation with Pharaoh. A partial release of “My people” wasn’t good enough. Liberation had to apply to men, women, and children as well as all creation. In some of the most stunning words of ancient literature, “Not a hoof shall be left behind.”49
God tried prophets.
God tried a king.
God tried a temple.
Nothing worked.
Finally God decided to go for broke: God stepped in. Literally. God sent the Son to be the Second Adam, the last Adam to stand firm where Adam didn’t, to lead the life that Adam wouldn’t, and to pay the price that Adam couldn’t. By assuming our humanity, Jesus made all creation sacramental and gave God a human voice.
The mission of the Second Adam? To show us how to be the kind of humans God created us to be, and to bring us back into a garden relationship with God. Luke recorded Peter preaching Jesus, “the author of life.”50 What kind of life? Human life living by divine life. Jesus returned to us our full humanity. The Creator’s original thought for human beings was that they would live by God’s divine, eternal, uncreated life. God wanted Adam and Eve to live by the Tree of Life. Adam, however, tragically chose to live by the wrong tree instead. Jesus, the Second Adam, lived by the life of His Father. And He has called all humans to live by His life just as He lived by His Father’s life.51
On the cross Jesus probed the limits of what it means to be human, enabling us to become fully human ourselves and thereby to participate in Jesus’ divine life. As the second-century church father Irenaeus explained it, just as the Spirit of God created a life at the beginning of time, the Holy Spirit created new life in Mary—a fresh start for humanity.52 The kingdom of God proclaims the possibility of a new person, a new human being. “Put on the new man,” Paul wrote.53
From beginning to end, the Bible shows us how to be a Jesus kind of human, the kind of garden human we were designed to be. How do we know the mission of that Second Adam is accomplished?
Mary Magdalene was the first person to whom Jesus appeared after His resurrection. Did Mary recognize Him? No, she thought He was the gardener.
What God has started lovingly, God will finish lovingly. In His life, death, and resurrection, Jesus redeemed and restored all four broken relationships. Only a redeemed human nature can truly radiate the divine nature, can radiate Christ. Jesus is the fulfillment of all God’s promises and the flowering of humanity. In coming to know Jesus, we come to know God, ourselves, others, and creation.54
Solon (c. 638–c. 558 BC) said, “Know thyself.”
Menander (343–292) countered, “Know other people.”
God (infinite) says, “Know Jesus, and you’ll know both.”55
CHAPTER 4
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Jesus’ Birth and Boyhood
The birth date of our God has signaled the
beginning of good news for the world.
—FIRST-CENTURY STONE INSCRIPTION
ANNOUNCING BIRTH OF CAESAR AUGUSTUS
JESUS WAS BORN �
�BEFORE CHRIST” (BC). PROBABLY 4 OR 5 BC.1
Jesus is always one step ahead.
And she brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.2
In some manger straw, Jesus was born. A defenseless baby lying amid the stench and stain of animal dung.
What was God’s answer to saving the world and righting all wrongs?
God became small and dirty.
A CULTURE OF PARADOX
Great power resides in the small, spare, simple.
A box cutter brought down a skyscraper and nearly bankrupted a nation.
A pamphlet on common sense sparked a revolution.
A song about overcoming changed the world.
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I bring you good news that will bring great joy to all people. The Savior—yes, the Messiah, the Lord—has been born today.
—ANGEL TO SHEPHERDS 3
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A little town birthed the Messiah.
And a small room on the lower level (a dirty room called a stable) cradled the Son of God.
Little is large if God is in it.
A large room on the upper level (a bare open chamber called the upper room) cradled the Spirit of God.
The word for both upper and lower rooms is the same. “Inn” translates as katalyma in Greek, which is mistakenly portrayed as a first-century “Best Eastern.” The only other time Luke used katalyma was to describe the Upper Room where Jesus and His disciples gathered for their Last Supper.4 When Luke did mean to indicate an “inn,” a rooming house for travelers, he used a different term, pandocheion. In the parable of the good Samaritan, the badly beaten man is taken by the compassionate Samaritan to a pandocheion, an “inn,” to recover.
In other words, by the time Mary and Joseph arrived at the home of Joseph’s Bethlehem relatives, the guest room was already occupied. The most common design for simple, first-century homes consisted of two levels. The upper floor was where the family slept and where a guest room might be available. The lower floor was used for ordinary daytime living and where the animals were kept at night. A separate stable for livestock would only be found among the well-off. The body heat from the first-floor animals would warm the air and rise to the upper sleeping quarters. Think of it as a very early form of radiant floor heating.
So it was probably into the lower level of a relative’s home, a house already overcrowded with kin, that Jesus was born. There was no cozy stable with well-tended stalls and lots of fresh straw on the ground. What was on the floor was waiting to be shoveled out in the morning so it could be dried out and then burned as fuel in the cooking fire. Comfort was over a century away from even being a concept. The lower level was a plain, open space where people could gather during the day and animals could be gathered at night. The only furniture available for the new mother to use for her baby was the feeding trough used by the animals, a manger.
The Bible does not say what animals were fed from that one Bethlehem trough, but the earliest depictions of the nativity portray an ox and an ass present at the manger.5 We do know what lives in straw, however: itch mites that bite. It seems that all God’s creatures were part of the reception party for Emmanuel, God with us.
In the Bible, Jesus always comes in surround sound. If you hear only one thing, you aren’t hearing Jesus. It is a sign of Jesus’ greatness that one thing can be said about Him and the opposite be true at the same time. Jesus is a paradox and an oxymoron rolled into one.
That makes Christianity a culture of paradox. Swiss theologian Emil Brunner pegged it right: “The hallmark of logical inconsistency clings to all genuine pronouncements of faith.”6
The Living Water gospel is a cocktail of opposites, a paradoxical brew of hydrogen and oxygen, fire and wind, “Lord I believe” and “help my unbelief,” as well as . . .
Come and live. Come and die.
Be as wise as serpents, innocent as doves.
My yoke is easy, my burden is light.
You want to be first? Be last.
You want to find yourself ? Lose yourself.
You want to be famous? Be humble.
The Prince of Peace came bringing a sword.
Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.
Jesus never tried to unknot His contradictions. Rather, He used these knots as rungs in the ladder to enable us to climb higher in truth and revelation.
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Man has been made more sacred than any superman or super-monkey . . . His very limitations have already become holy and like a home; because of that sunken chamber in the rocks, where God became very small.
—G. K. CHESTERTON 7
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What brings the opposites together and connects them is the sign of the cross. The Bible in general (and John’s gospel in particular) is sometimes called the Book of Signs. But the sign above all signs is the cross, which brings together the vertical and the horizontal. Jesus’ love is agape love. Agape love is made up of two dimensions: love of God and love of neighbor. The horizontal and the vertical go hand in hand. How do you show love of God, love of neighbor, and vice versa?8
The gospel goes parabolic beginning with Jesus’ birth, where God works little large with the whole of faith encapsulated in a very small package: one little act of love. Jesus is the definitive localization of the Creator’s universality. The incarnation is the original “small is big.”
UNTO US A CHILD IS BORN
There are 184 verses in the birth narratives of the Second Testament. These 184 verses presuppose or repeat the words of 170 verses from eighteen different books of the First Testament. Let’s start with John, the birth narrative that no one reads at Christmas, and then explore the more recited ones.
John’s gospel tells the story of Jesus’ birth in as storyless a way as possible. John’s account of how God made the longest Word short has no ox and ass or straw and shepherds—only philosophy: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”9
John’s birth narrative is structured in the signage of seven I AM metaphors, which function as a menorah that highlights the birth of Jesus just as the seven-branch golden lampstand called the menorah (“tree of life”) illuminated the ark of the covenant in the Holy of Holies, and the original Tree of Life lit up the garden of Eden.
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I see a solid gold lampstand with a bowl at the top and seven lights on it, with seven channels to the lights. Also there are two olive trees by it, one on the right of the bowl and the other on its left.
—ZECHARIAH 10
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The seven I AM metaphorical statements of Jesus in the gospel of John are followed by their corresponding circumstances in the story of Jesus’ birth:
“I am the bread of life.”11
Jesus was born in Bethlehem,
which means “house of
bread.”12
“I am the light of the world.”13
Jesus was born under the light of the star of Bethlehem.14
“I am the door of the sheep.”15
The doors of the guest house were closed to Mary and
Joseph, but the gate to the stable was open.16
“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life for
the sheep.”17
Baby Jesus was sought by shepherds looking for a baby
wrapped in swaddling bands (used for birth or burial),
and lying in a manger.18
“I am the resurrection and the life.”19
Jesus survived King Herod’s attempt to kill Him.20
“I am the way, the truth, and the life.”21
Wise men found
their way to Him, recognized the truth
about Him, and defied King Herod’s evil plot.22
“I am the true vine.”23
Jesus was born in Bethlehem Ephrathah, which means
“fruitful.”24
The parabolic curving of opposites into connection and conversation is evident right here and becomes one of the most distinctive features of John’s gospel. There is no higher understanding of Jesus’ divinity as the “Son of God” than John’s gospel. There is no fuller understanding of Jesus’ humanity as the “Son of Adam” (or “the Human Being”) than John’s gospel. John is the “I AM” gospel because Jesus appears in His mysterious “I AM–ness” as part of the triune life of the Godhead while Jesus is also present in His concreteness as “I am the door,” “I am the true vine,” “I am the Good Shepherd,” and so on. In the gospel of John, Jesus stands with His head in eternity and His feet in Eden.
The Spirit of God forms in us cross-shaped minds, bodies, and spirits. Christians live a cruciform life. And a cruciform life is a well-connected life that brings together the polarities: the ebb and flow of love and hate, belief and unbelief, joy and suffering, trust and uncertainty, saintliness and sinfulness. The cross is what bridges the banks, binds the ends, and marries the extremes of being. If anyone should be prepared for a future where polarities coincide, it is Christians, whose faith is friendly toward ambiguity, simultaneity, and double exposure. That’s why those who live the Jesus story have such sharp noses for incongruities and ironies. For biblical story-catchers, paradox can be paradise.
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The money in which the Roman poll-tax is paid [the denarius], . . . is, as it were, the star under which he was born in Bethlehem, where—according to another evangelist, Luke—his earthly parents had gone for registration for tax purposes.
—JAMES BUCHAN 26
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