God's Long Word

God's Word took 33 years to say.  His Word was Jesus.

You can't translate God's Word, not really.  It takes a hundred, a thousand, human words to create an approximation of this one Divine Word.  Innumerable words have been spoken and written about God, and all the ones that were worth saying or writing are just partial allusions to the One Word.

There are perhaps three phrases that help us most in hearing the Word that God has spoken.  The first one, which brings us initially to the beginning of God's speaking and yet also stretches us to the end of it, is 'God with us'.  God is with us, because he has come as one of us, sharing in our nature, born of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit.  Once we hear 'God with us' spoken in the manger at Bethlehem, we are amazed to realise that 'God with us' is still being said at the cross of Calvary.  Not only God with us in our createdness, in our nature, but God with us in the pit of our un-nature, our condemnation.  God with us.

The cross brings out the second phrase which the Word of God requires from us: 'God against us'.  In the death of Christ, we see God implacably opposed to our godlessness and evil, our futility.  Opposed to the point of death.  He is against us as we are, against us in all that we have made ourselves.  He will not let the 'me' I have built up survive, but will put it ('me'!) to death at the cross.  And from the perspective of the cross we can see that throughout the long saying of God's Word it has always been 'God against us'.  The birth from the Virgin is the contradiction of every human possibility, and looking forward so too is the emergence from the tomb.  God against us.

But there is that emergence from the tomb, and at that point perhaps more than any other we hear the third phrase: 'God for us'.  Here is the triumph over death and emptiness, here is sin vanquished, here is evil exterminated.  Here is life, life for us, even those whom God has set aside at the cross in the burning fire of his wrath.  And of course we see now that God was always for us: for us Christ became man, for us he went to the cross.  God for us.

The life of the man Jesus Christ is God's first and final Word on all human history and each individual human life.  Infinite human words would not exhaust what could be said about this One Word, and yet what matters most is not those words but that the One Word has been spoken, that Christ has become the decisive factor in my life and (whether you know it or not) yours.