Postscript:

Ending

Christians will begin with Jesus. We worship him; we believe him to be the definitive representative of God. We also believe him to be the definitive representative human being. He confirms the insight that somehow human beings are made 'in the image of God'.

The affirmation that Jesus was human and divine has been the subject of endless head-scratching and heart-searching in every century and in every human language and culture up to and beyond the edge of fantasy. Donald Baillie puts it sharply: 'It is astonishing how lightly many people assume that they know what the word God means. But it still more astonishing that even when we profess Christian belief and set out to try to understand the mystery of God becoming man, we are apt to start with some conception of God, picked up we know not where, ... which is different from the Christian conception; and then attempt the impossible task of understanding how such a God could be incarnate in Jesus.'

God took the initiative in Jesus; faith needs to say not only 'God chose Jesus' but also 'God chose to be Jesus'. Yet those who deny the parallel claim, that Jesus was humanly free to say 'no' just as any of us are free, are reducing a mystery to a sham. The gospels do, admittedly, contain stories which, taken alone, portray Jesus as another Jeremiah or Job, faithfully accepting his portion of suffering out of sheer human integrity. They also contain stories which, taken alone, portray him as an awesome magician or Superman with wholly other powers. The gospel writers do not caricature either Jesus' power or his powerlessness nor take either separately.

But there is no nicely calculated balance in the record or in the argument. It would never occur to any New Testament writer to consider that Jesus might not have been human. They had lived with him and seen him suffer. Their overriding concern is to demonstrate the presence of God in what he did and said as a person, in how he lived and died, in who he was and is and will be.

They had experienced the grace of God in their own lives and linked it with Jesus. In Galatians 2.20 Paul declares 'the life I now live is not my life, but the life which Christ lives in me'. I want to say that this approach offers the best clue as to how we might approach the matter of our own human destiny.

Christians came to believe that Jesus revealed God not only to be the source of all life and love but to display the connection between them, to affirm that this love is the life of God. Jesus as the self-expression of God, the embodiment of love, gives his life at the meeting-point of his personal choice and God's. The creator's own well-being is put on the line for the sake of the creation. We have to say that somehow God is self-denying.

It is one thing to recognise that 'there is no greater love than this, that someone should lay down his life for his friends'. (John 15.73) But Paul could say 'Christ died for us while we were yet sinners and that is God's proof of his love towards us.' And later we reach the logical (and nonetheless amazing) conclusion: 'The love of which we speak is not our love for God but his love for us... God is love'. This is our hope.

Sometimes Jesus is called sinless, a negative term which distances him from us ordinary mortals. But what does it mean? It is a pity we do not have two words for sin, one to use of the actions ('sins') and one to use of why they are wrong ('sin'). The second use of the word highlights the 'sinfulness' of sin: sinful because it separates us from God and so from life itself. Jesus was not distanced from God; his love was total, it was perfected.

Yet Christians have never found themselves saying about the resurrection of Jesus, in effect, 'well, he was God, so what do you expect'. That surely is because his not being distanced from God is another way of saying that Jesus, like God, 'is love'. Just because he is love we can see that he was not alien to us either.

This belief that God's love equals God's life is the link with our own hope of glory. Eternal life is the love of God that we glimpse in others such as my mother. We may even exhibit that love ourselves by God's good grace -- if only partially and occasionally. Insofar as we choose the way of self-giving love, to that degree does the life of God exist in us and we in God.

If self-denial is the mysterious hallmark of God, then the phrase 'whoever loses his life ... will gain it' becomes a description of the very nature of God. If, in faith, we sacrifice what we see as our self-interest and allow the love of God to rule -- if only partially and occasionally -- then there is something of God in us too.

It is here we can echo the instincts of other religious traditions that the 'immortality of the soul' is to do with being 'taken up' into God. At the same time we do not lose our own faith that this is what being 'in Christ' means for us. If sin is separation from God, the opposite of sin -- being 'in Christ' -- must be life.

The New Testament is full of pointers to this insight. This is 'Christ in you, the hope of glory'. This is Christ 'the first-fruits' of the rich harvest anticipated by both Paul and John in their different ways. This is 'love that will never come to an end' because it is the life of God.

This has to be the 'I' that will live for ever, 'the life that Christ lives in me'. Allowing the strength of Paul's retort of 'You fool' to the question 'how are the dead raised, in what kind of body?', we who believe in the resurrection of Jesus can hardly believe less than in some identifiable personal presence for each one, a 'resurrection body'. This is the full representation of the 'I' that is meant to be -- the opposite of the 'self' -- the 'I' through which the love of God, the only eternal reality, will at last be able to shine undeniably.