Homo Liturgicus: Like Father, Like Son

Some of you have asked whether I plan to keep my promise to continue to explore the theme of Homo Liturgicus, Man the Worshiper. The reason I have let it drop is simply that I haven’t yet formed the data into any real cohesive whole. I have ideas of where the theme could go, but there are plenty of gaps in the outline in my head.

That said, why don’t we jump back in and see where it leads?

To be brought up to speed, click here. In a nutshell, my thesis is that it is in Christ that man’s sacrificial telos is fully and finally realized. By “sacrificial telos” I mean that man, by virtue of his being a divine image-bearer, was created to worship his Maker and love his bride with a self-giving love that can only be described as sacrificial in nature. Adam’s failure was essentially priestly—he failed to guard and tend the garden (both priestly duties) from the unholy intruder, choosing rather to opt for his own well-being instead of engaging in holy war.

Now if part of Adam’s role as divine image-bearer consisted of displaying self-giving love, the conclusion must be true that this very self-giving love is displayed within the Godhead itself. In other words, Adam could not have been expected to exhibit virtues or behavior that is completely foreign to the God who made him. The question that arises, then, is whether Scripture actually teaches that the inner life of the Trinity is characterized in this way.

I think the Bible is clear that Adam’s imaging of his Creator by sacrificially loving God and neighbor would truly have been an example of his patterning his behavior after the members of the Godhead. “The Father loves the Son,” Jesus says, “and has given all things into his hand” (John 3:35). Paul instructs the Ephesians to “be imitators of God, as beloved children” and to “walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (5:1-2). One of most sublime passages along these lines comes from Philippians 2:5-11:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

N.T. Wright’s treatment of this passage in The Climax of the Covenant (insert roughly six pages of qualifications here) is quite instructive. Of particular importance is Paul’s term harpagmon, which is often rendered thusly: “Christ did not consider his equality with God something to grasp after.” Wright suggests that the word (which is not used anywhere else in Scripture) be understood as Christ not using his divinity as something to be exploited for his own ends. He writes:

The sense of [the Greek] will then be that Christ, in contrast to what one might have expected, refused to take advantage of his position…. Nothing described by either [being in the form of God] or [equality with God] is given up; rather, it is reinterpreted, understood in a manner in striking contrast to what one might have expected.

The real humiliation of the incarnation and the cross is that one who was himself God, and who never during the whole process stopped being God, could embrace such a vocation. The real theological emphasis of the hymn, therefore, is not simply a new view of Jesus. It is a new understanding of God.

What Wright is saying here is that Jesus, by his refusal to exploit his position for his own ends, actually displayed the character of his Father in a new and fuller way than it was known before, for it was by means of his sacrificial, self-giving love that the Son revealed what the Father is really like.

Calvary reveals the truth about what it meant to be God…. Incarnation and even crucifixion are to be seen as appropriate vehicles for the dynamic self-revelation of God.

The resurrection of Christ only serves to demonstrate the Father’s approval of the Son’s divine image-bearing:

It is the affirmation, by God the Father, that the incarnation and death of Jesus really was the revelation of the divine love in action. In giving to Jesus the title kurios, and in granting him to share that glory which, according to Isaiah, no one other than Israel’s God is allowed to share, God the Father is as it were endorsing that interpretation of divine equality which… the Son adopted. Christ’s exaltation and divine honor are the public recognition that what was accomplished in his obedience and death was the outworking of the very character of God.

If “the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise” (John 5:19), then it would stand to reason that the Son’s life of self-giving love was only a mimicking of what he has always seen the Father display. After all, that’s what sons do, isn’t it—they copy their dads. If God is a heavenly Father who eternally generates a Son, then is it not to be expected that the Son would return that gift of self-giving love, both to his Father and to us?