This week, we are continuing our look at the Apostles’ Creed, which says,

I believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried; he descended into hell; on the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty; from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen.

Last week we looked at the peculiarity of the Christian belief in a single God who created the whole universe. To a polytheistic world, this idea of God was revolutionary, but its what comes next that really gets people’s hackles up. One God in heaven is one thing, but when we talk about God taking on human form and especially dying in the worst way imaginable, then we really get into scandalous territory, although the familiarity of Christian faith in the Western World has robbed this idea of it’s shock-value. So I invite you to try to imagine you’ve never heard these ideas before. How would you react if you heard that the God of the universe became a human and he was subjected to a humiliating death?

‌Son of God

The second part of the creed concerns itself with the second person of the triune God: the son. If you stop to think about it, it seems odd to say that God had a son. Yes, Greek gods had lots of kids, but later Jews believed in one God who is Spirit. Does he split in two via mitosis?

So of God is a very specific term in Christian Theology. It has taken on that meaning as the church has reflected on who Jesus was. But in the time when Jesus came, the term was more up for grabs. Some would describe an exceptionally accomplished person as a son of god. So in our modern context, it would be like saying LeBron James, Steve Jobs or Albert Einstein were sons of God. Perhaps more relevant to our understanding of Jesus as the son of God, Roman emperors, particularly Augustus, began claiming that emperors became gods upon their death, so the current emperor could be described as ‘son of god’. We have Roman coins, for example, with the Effigy of Octavian (Caesar Augustus) and the inscription Emperor Octavian, son of the divine Julius. To call Jesus “Son of God” is a deliberate way of claiming that Jesus is the true king and Caesar is a pretender.

How does God have a son? Obviously Jesus’ sonship is an analogy that breaks down if you push it too far. God the Father didn’t engage in the kind of procreative acts that typically lead to bouncing baby boys. The three-ness and one-ness of God is hard to wrap our heads around. The good news is that we don’t need to understand it to be saved by it. In his gospel, John describes the relationship like this:

​John 1:1–14NIV

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Jesus was God’s word. Or, as I like to think of it, Jesus is everything God has to say about himself. So what does the God have to say about himself in and through Jesus the Son

‌Born of the Virgin Mary

‌Identifying with the Poor

Kings are usually born to royal families. In the days before hospitals, they would be born in palaces. But Mary isn’t a queen or a princess, and the stable in Bethlehem where she gives birth to Jesus is a far cry from a palace. Sending Jesus to be born to a family of peasants in a difficult circumstances communicates something about God. God isn’t busy hobnobbing with the ‘powerful’ and ‘important’ people (by human standards), instead he identifies with peasants in a land under harsh political occupation. God shows he’s not too self-important to be with us in all our brokenness and desperation.

Jesus’ life communicates the same humility we see expressed in the humble circumstances of his birth. It seems Jesus’ earthly father—Joseph—dies early (He is mentioned in a story from Luke’s gospel where Jesus is twelve, but he’s not mentioned in any of the stories during Jesus’ ministry, leading most people to conclude he has passed away). During his ministry he experiences homelessness. And, of course, he dies the tragic death that was far too common among those at the bottom of the socio-economic heap: he was crucified. So Jesus takes on flesh, but no the dignified flesh we would expect him to take on. He takes on our pain, weakness and scorn.

‌Born of a Virgin

That’s the significance of his being born to Mary, but of course, she is described in the creed as the “Virgin Mary”. This teaching offends our modern, scientific minds. The world works according to rules, and one of those rules that is that the conception of human babies require two human parents.

God has created a world that functions in a rational and predictable way. I’m glad he did. It means that we can develop science and technology that have the effect of (we hope) making life better for people. But it all started somewhere. There has to be a cause to the universe, and that means that there needs to be something or someone who can make something out of nothing (which violates our understanding of the laws of the natural world). If we believe that God is the creator of heaven and earth, is it too much to believe that he could also choose to work around the normal rules of biology and conceive a child by the Holy Spirit. This union of human and divine gives rise to the one who is Son of God and Son of Man, The Word made flesh. God with us.

Paul uses Adam as representative of humanity, and Jesus as a ‘second Adam’ (in both

Romans 5

and

1 Corinthians 15

). Adam is called a Son of God (in Luke 3:38) because he is created directly by God, and not through the natural physical process by which we are conceived. Yet Adam is unlike Jesus. Adam is other than God, fully man. while Jesus is a marriage of God’s very self with humanity so he is fully man, but also fully God.

‌Suffered, Crucified, Dead & Buried

One criticism of the Creed is that it focuses on Jesus’ birth and death, but has very little to say about what happened between them. Part of this is that the creed was trying to clarify the church’s teaching on issues that had been controversial at the time when it was written. But the word ‘suffered’ in the creed can lift a heavy load, referring not just to what happened to Jesus on Good Friday, but as a single word to summarize his life. As Ben Myers says,

The Apostles’ Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism“Suffered”

among the earliest Christians it had become customary to sum up Jesus’ whole life under one word: “suffering.” We can already see that in the Gospels themselves: “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things?” (Luke 24:26). Luke records that Paul summed up Jesus’ life in the same way: “It was necessary for the Messiah to suffer” (Acts 17:3). By the time of the later New Testament writings, the word “suffering” has become a convenient formula for referring to the whole story of Jesus’ life and death: “he suffered” (Heb 2:18).

Christianity, of course, is not an abstract philosophy about the nature of suffering. It is about a real person who suffered very concretely. The “under Pontius Pilate” grounds the Christian story of redemption in real history. The salvation we enjoy is available to us because of real events that happened to a real person in history. That suffering, of course is the crucifixion of Jesus.

The cross is among the most heinous forms of punishment ever devised by the human mind. First, it was horribly painful. In fact, the word we use to describe the worse pain someone can experience—excruciating—comes from the crucifixion (it literally means “from the cross.” It often involved days of agony where the victim exhausted themselves trying to draw each breath until their exhaustion overcame their need to breathe. It was an awful way to go.

But the cross is more than just an implement of physical torture. It is also a device meant to humiliate. The victim is badly beaten, and then lifted up on a pole, Naked (the fancy underpants we see in the paintings is just there to keep things PG) to expire in front of a public audience. Crucifixion was a punishment for rebels or escaped slaves, people who forgot their place and needed to be reminded in the most horrific way possible.

To undergo crucifixion was to be put in ones place. So to say that someone who was crucified is Lord was shocking to Jesus’ contemporaries. Lordship is about glory and power. How could you ascribe such qualities to one who was humiliated in such an ignoble way? And lest there be any ambiguity about Jesus’ fate, lest we think maybe they sloppily let him off of the cross before he had quite expired, we are told that Jesus was buried. That’s the end of the line. Or at least…it should be. We’ll look at the unexpected twist in the story next week.

‌He descended to Hell

The Bible doesn’t tell us much about the place of the dead (called Sheol in the OT or Hades in the New Testament. It seems from Old Testament texts that Sheol is not a place exclusively for the wicked, as Samuel is recalled from Sheol by a medium at Saul’s request. By saying Jesus descended to hell (or “to the dead” in some versions of the creed) we see that even when Jesus is killed, the same thing happens to him that happens to everyone else. Once it gets there, that’s when things turn around, but we’ll get to that next week.

‌God with Us

We’ve only looked at half the story, we’ll continue to look at the more exciting part of Jesus’ story next week. But I want to stop here and reflect on different Jesus’ story is from the story we might expect. God is great and powerful, majestic and transcendent. If we encounter God, we would expect it to be in places that inspire awe and wonder. We might picture Jesus being born on the summit of Mount Everest or at the Grand Canyon. But instead, when God enters the world, he does so inconspicuously. Perhaps the angel choir was God’s concession tot he heavenly host who couldn’t help but sing for joy when the day of his arrival came. But, true to form for a God who reveals himself in a little baby, born to peasants, God allows the angels to tell other poor and rejected people—the shepherds.

The story of the lowly son is a story about the depths to which God is willing to go to be with us. It’s about the pain he is willing to experience to save us. It is about the shame he is willing to endure so that he can lift us up. The son is God’s message to all who live on this ball of rock we call earth. Despite our insignificance in the face of an infinite universe, despite the apparent limitlessness of our ability to hurt one another, God loves us. The Son, born of a virgin, who suffered crucifixion, died, was buried and descended into hell is God’s love letter to his wayward creation.

But, of course, the death of Jesus isn’t the tragic end of a sad story. It’s the only the beginning of the most wonderful story ever told. But we’ll get to that next week.