It was understandable, I guess, when the group seemed momentarily taken aback when I opened my Bible and suggested reading “the entire Christmas story.” You see, the night was already winding down at our church home-group meeting, and in the Gospel of Matthew that narrative runs a hefty 48 verses and in Luke it is longer still at 120 verses. No, I assured my friends, I wanted to read the entire Christmas story in one verse. (Well, technically two verses covering one sentence.) Though it does not mention shepherds or wise-men or inns or stables, it is nonetheless profound and compelling.
I’d like to share that verse here and then “unpack” it just a bit, section by section. It comes from the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Galatians, chapter 4 verses 4-5:
4 But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.
But when the set time had fully come…
Why did Jesus come just when he did? What about all the centuries of human history that came before, a history that featured entire empires rising and falling? And what about the centuries that were to follow? Would there not have been a more opportune time? In the 1970 rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, the character of Judas Iscariot questions Jesus about his strategic timing. Stepping of out of his 1st century setting and speaking more like a modern day publicist, Judas asks Jesus:
Why’d you choose such a backward time in such a strange land? If you’d come today you would have reached the whole nation, Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication!
Why, then, did Jesus come precisely when he did? Without providing us with all the answers, Paul assures us that the time was precisely right. That is, according to our calendar at approximately 4 B.C., in the small Roman province of Judea set in the East Mediterranean, “the set time had fully come” for the divine plan to move into high gear.
God sent his Son…
Who is Jesus Christ? This is perhaps the most important question that the human race has had to grapple with. “Who do you say that I am?” Jesus asks Peter at a pivotal moment in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). And that question is even more strongly highlighted in the Gospel of John as the author leads us step by step to the point where he hopes that we can exclaim with the disciple Thomas, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). The extraordinary mystery of the Christmas story is that the baby conceived in Mary’s womb, and humbly born in a stable in Bethlehem, was God in the flesh. Behold the Son of God incarnate, sent by God the Father at precisely the right time!
Born of a woman…
Protestant Christians tend to neglect the person of Mary. Historically this has to do with the perceived over-emphasis given to the figure of Mary in some of the other Christian traditions. But the fact is that Scripture presents Mary as an extraordinary young woman, profoundly open to God and willing to lay down her life and reputation to see God’s plan come to fruition. When the angel Gabriel announces to her that she would conceive a son even though she was a virgin, Mary humbly accepts God’s plan. “I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you have said” (Luke 1:38).
But there is something more we can say under this heading. If “God sent his Son” affirms the divine nature of Jesus Christ, “born of a woman” affirms that he was also fully and completely human. Years later, when he hung on the cross Jesus felt real pain, when his disciples ran away in the garden he felt real loneliness, and when he cried out from the cross “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he was surely not simply quoting Psalm 22, but expressing to God the Father what he really felt like at that profound moment in his mission.
Born under the law…
Nobody wants to talk about law and guilt these days, but if we don’t we might miss something essential. Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans that all human beings are in one sense or another “under the law.” That is, we do not make up our own rules – at least not on things that really matter, issues of ultimate right and wrong. Jews in Paul’s time had the revealed law of God in the Torah. And all other peoples (the Gentiles) had a sense of God’s law written on their hearts, something we often call “conscience”. In either case – whether it be under written Torah or under conscience – each and every human being has failed to follow that law and therefore we suffer condemnation and fear before God. The cycle of knowing what is right, failure to do it, and the resulting guilt is a kind of slavery. Paul calls it “slavery under the elemental spiritual forces of the world” in Galatians 4:3, the verse just preceding our Christmas verse. And from that slavery we need to be redeemed – a word that means freed from slavery, especially freed by means of someone paying a price.
Before we move on, we must acknowledge one wonderful exception to the human experience of failure before “the law.” Scripture affirms that in his humanity Jesus Christ was like us in every way, except without sin (see Hebrews 4:15). He is, therefore, uniquely fit to play the role of redeemer, being both divine and human and yet not himself caught in the web of sin and guilt.
To redeem those under the law…
Many non-Christians today are happy to acknowledge that Jesus of Nazareth was a great ethical teacher, and some are even willing to allow that he was a miracle-worker. But did you know that Jesus’ primary mission was neither to teach nor to perform miracles? Jesus describes his mission in Mark 10:45-46. Here, referring to himself by his favorite term “the Son of Man,” he says:
For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.
Did you catch that last phrase? He came…to give his life as a ransom for many. This explains so many things in the life of Jesus, including why the Gospel writers spend so much time describing his suffering and death (sometimes called the Passion Narrative). So what can we say happened on Christmas day? A Savior was born who would one day redeem the world by the deliberate and voluntary sacrifice of his life. That was indeed a costly price that he paid, but something that was in view from the very beginning. It was part of the divine plan that started in earnest “when the set time had fully come.”
…that we might receive adoption to sonship.
With this concluding phrase the true purpose of the Christmas story has become clear. Why was the Son sent? Why did Jesus come? His life, death, and resurrection were for the purpose of setting captives free to be adopted as “sons” and “daughters” of God. Now the sonship that Jesus has is natural and inherent to his person as the incarnate Son of God. But through Jesus each of us has the opportunity to become a child of God in a different sense, presented here under the wonderful image of “adoption”.
The Gospel of John expresses this thought in a poignant way in 1:11-12. With opening phrases intended to remind us, perhaps, of the fact that there was “no room” for Jesus either in Bethlehem at his birth or in many human hearts in subsequent history, John writes
11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. 12 Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.
Merry Christmas
By: Ray Pennoyer (11 December 2011)
Excellent post. Of course there are many things to unpack – as Dr. Pennoyer says.
It would be interesting to consider ideas concerning “the set time.” What was unique to this time? Was it the advent of a particular language, technology, philosophy, religion, politics in the region, some spiritual dimension, post-Diaspora-deportation (or pre-Diaspora (A.D. 70)), a certain population density, etc.? Go to the Blue Letter Bible and put the word “time” into the search box – much comes up. God does everything on a calendar however “inconvenient” or “convenient” it might appear to us. Yet it is interesting to consider what is behind the timing. Often mentioned are causes and conditions.
Consider for example the end times.
Consider two points (and there are perhaps many others) concerning the return of Jesus which appears to be timed to at least a couple of things.
1) Completion of preaching the Gospel to the whole world. “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” (Matt.24:14)
2) Great unparalleled distress and the threat of global (?) annihilation
For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now–and never to be equaled again. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened. (Matt.24:21-22).
Undoubtedly these verses provoke much discussion but if taken at face value, it would seem that two apparent facts need to be fulfilled before the Second Coming: preaching of the Gospel globally and the capability to destroy all life. An unstudied guess at what this means is that Jesus returns around the time when the world has been largely evangelized and technology permits the capability to support the claim “no one would survive.” Are there any candidate technologies that can support this claim?
Again, there is a good deal of speculation thrown in here but you get the point: some proxy indicators of the end “time” are given. It would seem that Jesus’ return is at least partly based on observable social and technological factors if the prophecy is taken at face value.
Back to my original point: what about the first advent and its timing? What kinds of things made it the right time? Is it a particular language, technology, philosophy, religion, politics in the region, some spiritual dimension, post-Diaspora-deportation (or pre-Diaspora (A.D. 70)), a certain population density, etc.? Is it some mixture of these things?
Just a thought….
I summed it up this way: He ( the Father), “chose the moment and the place, and especially the race, to intervene in history; becoming flesh for all to see.” P.S. Thanks for quoting from Jesus Christ Superstar. There’s some terrific insight put to music, especially coming from Judas and the Jewish Priests and Elders.
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Hi Daralene – You’re right about Jesus Christ Superstar – there are a number of great and insightful moments in that work, especially as presented in the original cast recording of 1970. Of course there are also moments of theological confusion.
I like the poetic verse you have written very much, though at least in your re-presentation here someone might get the mistaken impression that it was God the Father that took on human flesh. Of course it was God the Son, the second person of the one Triune God. But here I am lapsing into prose when you were soaring into beautiful poetry!
Hi John – thanks for your thoughtful comments.
It is interesting to consider the factors that may go into the divine timing of Jesus’ two advents – the first being the one we celebrate at Christmas and the second still future to us.
Part of the answer to the timing of his first advent must have to do with God’s work in Israel and among the nations. The timing was somehow right in God’s dealings with Israel to send to them the Messiah Jesus, the messiah who would then become the light to the nations. We even see that this timing seems to extend to the exact moment (year? month?) that Jesus was to be crucified. John 12:20-28 recounts what turns out to be a pivotal moment: non-Jews (Gentiles) have now come and want to see Jesus. Jesus’ response? “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” by which Jesus means his voluntary death as he goes on “Unless a kernal of wheat falls to the ground and dies…” etc. His death and resurrection is necessary to open the door for full inclusion of Gentiles in the people of God. And so the presence of Gentiles wanting to see him is a sign to Jesus “now is the time.”
The factors you suggest relating to Jesus’ future second coming may well be right but I am less confident that these signs are still future to us. That would mean that Jesus could come any time. Specifically, to your two points:
1) On Matt 24:14, we have to ask “What does it mean to reach the whole world with the gospel?” Are we saying that Jesus cannot return yet? And therefore the general faith of our Christian brothers and sisters throughout the centuries (that Jesus could come back at any time) was misplaced?
2) In Matt. 24:21-22, are we sure this distress has not been fulfilled already? As you know, some scholars have argued that this particular section in the Olivet Discourse relates to the destruction of the temple in 70 AD. If they are right in this interpretation, it was part of Jesus’ prediction of that momentous event and something now in our past.
It just seems to me more in keeping with the tenor of the New Testament that we live wisely and productively (of course), but with the thought that – basically – Jesus could return in power at any time.
Thanks again, Ray