Friday • 12/29/2023 •
The Fifth Day of Christmas
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 18:1–20; 2 Samuel 23:13–17b; 2 John 1–13; John 2:1–11
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 10 (“The Second Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 55:6–11; BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (“A Song to the Lamb,” Revelation 4:11; 5:9–10, 13, BCP, p. 93)
Welcome to Daily Office Devotions. I’m Reggie Kidd, and it’s a joy to be with you this Fifth Day of Christmas. If you are a follower of Daily Office Devotions, you may recall these observations from 2 John from the 3rd Week of Easter. I think 2 John’s cautionary words are worth listening to again.
“Progress” ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. “Everyone who does not abide in the teaching of Christ, but goes beyond it, does not have God” (2 John 9a). The New American Bible translation brilliantly captures the sense of this verse: “Anyone who is so ‘progressive’ as not to remain in the teaching of the Christ does not have God.” The NAB editors explain their translation: “Anyone who is so ‘progressive’: literally, ‘Anyone who goes ahead.’ Some gnostic groups held the doctrine of the Christ come in the-flesh to be a first step in belief, which the more advanced and spiritual believer surpassed and abandoned in his knowledge of the spiritual Christ. The author affirms that fellowship with God may be gained only by holding to the complete doctrine of Jesus Christ (1 Jn 2:22–23; 4:2; 5:5–6).”
The biblical portrait of Jesus’s incarnation cannot be improved upon; and those who try to do so create a profound distortion. Some lose his full humanity. Others lose his full deity. Still others insert disharmony between his humanity and his deity. For four centuries the church fought back various attempts to “progress” beyond the biblical portrait of Jesus. Arians diminished his deity. Gnostics deprived him of his humanity. Nestorians made his divinity and his humanity into virtual rivals within him. Apollinarians envisioned Jesus’s divinity absorbing his humanity. In the end, the church’s way of not “going beyond the teaching of Christ,” but rather of locking it in, crystallizing it, and anchoring it was the Chalcedonian formula of AD 381: “Christ, Son, Lord, Only begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.”
Image: Pixabay
If I may offer an opinion. Today’s church is not in peril because it doesn’t have the right answers about gun control, border control, reparations, marriage equality, or planet warming. Not that those questions don’t matter. They do. But every policy issue raises pre-political, pre-policy questions. Questions about fundamental values of human flourishing and well-being underlie each issue, as Jonathan Haidt offers in The Righteous Mind: sanctity, authority, loyalty, fairness, freedom, generosity, care.* Without a clear conception of how God’s coming in the flesh in Jesus Christ shapes us at the pre-policy level, we are blowing smoke when we pontificate as though we were policy experts.
In other words, the church is imperiled because it doesn’t know how to answer this question: Who is Jesus Christ? For knowing Jesus Christ is the first order of business in being able to say anything about anything else.
It doesn’t matter whether our sense of “progress” moves us to refashion Jesus as a merely mortal moral example, a nearly divine champion of our cause, or an otherworldly Being who swoops in to rescue us for heaven. To move beyond the Bible’s and the ancient church’s Christology is to step into a void.
Was he born of the Virgin Mary and of the Holy Spirit, to preach good news to the poor and inaugurate God’s Kingdom? Did he die in the flesh for our sins? Did he rise bodily for our justification before God’s law court, for our adoption into the family of God, and for our sanctification into the image of Christ? Will he return bodily in power and splendor to glorify the church and transfigure creation? These are stunning truths—verities not to “progress” beyond, and foundational premises for working out any of life’s challenges.
May God give us the grace to “remain in the teaching” about Christ, so that we do not “progress” our way right past it. May God therefore give us grace to pray well and act effectively on behalf of Christ in every area of blight and brokenness and suffering and sorrow.
“Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us from God the Father and from Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son, in truth and love” (2 John 3).
Be blessed “in truth and love” this day,
Reggie Kidd+
Adapted from Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Vintage/Random House, 2013).