God is Human, Only More So

In my blog post for Pentecost 14 B, I gave my interpretation of what Jesus might have meant when he said, in John 6:56: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.” I said it was about the same thing John’s Gospel means in John 1:14: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” That is, both Jesus and God are both divine and human.

One of my favorite scholars of Hebrew Scriptures, John Collins, says that our Old Testament says God is like a king, only more so. I think we can add that God is human, only more so.

We are on the puny end of the human spectrum. So we keep polarizing. We cling to the binary. And the binary at stake here is the human/divine. We split them. We imagine an impenetrable barrier.

Much of the early history of the church was marked by a divide between the theologians of the schools of Antioch and Alexandria. The former tended to stress the human Jesus, and the latter the divine.

But when Jesus, our Lord says “Eat my flesh,” he is urging us to keep divinity and humanity together.

When the Apostle Paul, in Romans 8, tells us that we have the Spirit of God working inside us, calling out “Abba, Father,” is he speaking in human terms or divine? The answer is, both. God has planted within the human spirit a divine urge to go higher.

It has long been a fashion for college professors to knock down any notion that we  human beings have anything like a universal sense of good and evil. They can easily show that any prima facie moral wrong, such as the prohibition against taking a life, may be violated under certain circumstances. If one must kill a vicious intruder to protect one’s family, that could be seen as a good. And different cultures and circumstances could easily change our perspectives on when exactly the wrong turns good and vice versa.

So, is every idea of the human relative? Not really. A study was done years ago that showed that young college students from a great variety of cultural backgrounds tended to agree about who the heroes and villains were in various movies.

I count on the aberrant personality, who acts with supreme cruelty, to hate her- or him-self for it all. If not, they have ceased to be truly human.

This is where the divine and human meet. We have within us a desire for the “more so.” We have a hunger for a God who is human in the best sense of the humane. We have that hunger to have that work in our own souls. This brings us closer to the humane God.

God is King, only more so. God is human, only more so. And we can call upon that Spirit that calls out “Abba, Father,” to help us grow towards our better humanity--to discern the humane and inhumane ways of interpreting Scripture and living our lives.