I HAVE said before that tackling John 1.1-14 is an enormous ask at Christmas. At least there may be 1.14 to cling to: “The Word became flesh and lived amongst us.” We need only do not forget that the “Word” is a reputation for Jesus, to understand the proven fact that one who dwelt with God is selecting to dwell “amongst us”.
Christmas Day is hardly the perfect time for engaging with Hebrews, either. The theology on this reading is as dense as a Christmas pudding stuffed with wealthy ingredients. Perhaps the Holy Spirit will lead us into the reality of its teachings. But sensible readers co-operate with the Spirit by themselves looking for illumination as well.
In Hebrews, the death of Jesus is an ideal sacrifice, bringing to its fulfilment which means of accessing God. The “latest and living way” that it reveals is access to God through his Son. So it tells us quite a bit about this Son, but not with stories about him, or his teachings; as a substitute, it plunges us straight into theology. Rather than lead us to search out out who Jesus is by hearing what he does, Hebrews tells us who Jesus is in order that we will make sense of what he does.
Key to that presentation is verse 3 of the reading: “He is the reflection of God’s glory and the precise imprint of God’s very being.”
Our view of the connection between the Father and the Son will depend on whether we translate a Greek word, apaugasma, as “reflection” or “radiance”. Both senses are possible. One translation imagines light from the Father (original) illuminating the Son (copy), while the opposite imagines the Son as a source of sunshine in himself. Is Jesus an ideal copy, or is he an original, a source? NRSV chooses “reflection”. I can be tempted to decide on “radiance”.
What no single translation can do is to specific, with a single word, the entire meaning of the Greek: that Jesus is each. Either way, it helps that “glory” is attached to this “reflection” or “radiance”; for the important thing idea inbuilt to “glory” is light, understood with intense positivity.
When the writer calls Jesus the “imprint of [God’s] very being”, we’re thrown out of the theological frying-pan into the fireplace. The Greek word character means an imprinted likeness, akin to a coin portrait. Jesus is recognisably “like” God, it says. Just as in English, the word “like” in Greek means each “similar but not an identical” and likewise “exactly alike”.
That looks like quite enough in regards to the natures of Father and Son to be wrestling with through the Christmas festive period. But the following Greek word goes to boost the alert level of each theologian to DEFCON 1: hypostasis. Jesus is the “exact/similar imprint” of God’s hypostasis. Does hypostasis mean “person”, as traditional theology of the Trinity has it, or does it mean “being/substance”? Putting it more straightforwardly, does this word tell us that God and Christ are manufactured from the identical stuff, or that they’re the identical person(s)?
If, by now, you’re thoroughly confused, you aren’t alone. So many confusions in our interested by God are rooted within the inadequacy of words to say what we would like and want them to give you the option to say. Whenever we apply a word to God or Christ, be it “reflection”, “radiance”, “imprint”, “being”, or the like, we immediately mislead ourselves by pondering that we have now described God. In reality, words often have multiple shades of meaning, and additionally they change over time. So, even after we use the identical word as one other person, we cannot make certain that we have now the identical ideas of God in mind — or that what words once meant is what they at all times mean.
Words aren’t enough to explain God. They are useful tools, and sometimes vital teaching aids. What they can not do is define him, because they’re at all times changing, and shifting in meaning: “I the LORD don’t change” (Malachi 3.6); “[He] doesn’t change like shifting shadows” (James 1.17 NIV),
Hebrews agrees with this tackle God the Father: “You are the identical, and your years won’t ever end” (drawing on Psalm 102.27). Towards the tip (13.8), Hebrews declares the identical of God the Son: “Jesus Christ is similar yesterday and today and for ever.” Those words are its Christmas gift to us.
