The Lord is here; his kingdom has come. (Part 5)

The Lord is here; his kingdom has come

Part 5: The centrality of accepting that Jesus is Lord

The Holy Spirit is almost a complete mystery! I find it almost comical to think that after being a Christian for 50 years I have almost no understanding of God. However, I take comfort in the thought that this is not entirely a bad thing. Partly we can claim that it’s inevitable because God is so far beyond our understanding, and though this is, theoretically, true, my defence does not rest on this point. Rather I see more clearly that Christian faith is based on our individual experience of our experience of the presence of God and this should rightly be focussed through an experience of what God has done in Christ – and it is this that I am developing a deeper understanding of. Christianity is not a carefully worked out faith, honed on theoretical or academic principles until all the pieces fit together in a coherent and consistent whole. Rather, in a spiritual equivalent of the Big Bang, it exploded into life through the experience of the person, Jesus. What the first disciples were most aware of is that, “Jesus is Lord!”. They were acutely aware that, in Jesus, they had seen God. Remember that for Jews in particular, this was an absolutely scandalous belief. However, they were constrained by the power of their experience to come to this conclusion. The bedrock of their faith is that in the person of Jesus, God has come to us; he has offered himself to us in all the fullness of God – that is, God the Father. And, in Jesus, God has saved us. This was all part of the first disciples current experience. To them, it was mind-blowing; something that they could not fully understand. And their experience is the experience of Christians ever since. However, the first Christians didn’t sit around for several generations thinking, “We must mull this over carefully, and one day we will have a humdinger of a new religion to launch into the world”. Instead, they worked out from their present experience of the presence of God in Jesus, and rejoiced in that revelation, while trying to work out what all this means in some sort of coherent intellectual sense. It took Christians over 300 years just to get the basics of our theology sorted out – but, again, I do not see this as a weakness of Christianity, but a strength. For what it is testament to is that our faith rests in, and is developed from, the unique experience of God’s presence in Jesus – and not in any carefully thought-out religious theory. This experience of the presence of God in Jesus was, most of all, focussed on the experience of the risen Christ.

This, of course, is precisely where my own faith is at its weakest, but I will do my best to return to explore this. For now, the interesting point is that, though the resurrection appearances of Jesus were absolutely crucial – it is unthinkable that Christianity could have begun without them – they were few in number and short lived. Christianity does not rest on experiencing appearances of the risen Christ – nor, in fact, on visions of him. It is extremely significant that when the appearances of the risen Christ stopped – in the event known as the ascension of Christ – the first Christians were not at all sad or disappointed. This is because they were overwhelmed with their new way of experiencing God – God the Holy Spirit.