Part 3 of “We Believe: The Nicene Creed”
Texts: Colossians 1:15-20; John 1:1-18
One of my favorite assignments as a young infantry officer in the Army was my stint as leader of the battalion scout platoon. The scout platoon was the reconnaissance unit, which meant that we spent a lot of time operating forward of the battalion and which also meant that we spent a lot of time being inserted into the area of operations by helicopter.
Back then, our aviation units were still flying UH-1s, which were the iconic choppers of the Vietnam War. In fact, many of our pilots were senior chief warrant officers who had flown combat missions in southeast Asia and still flew like they were there. I remember a lot of crazy rides where the skids were smacking the treetops and landings where you had to jump out of the chopper about three feet off the ground as these pilots had learned that touching down in an LZ could mean landing on a mine. It was ok if you found one, though—infantrymen are more expendable than helicopters!
I got to know some of these pilots and their crew chiefs and the choppers themselves fascinated me. In chatting with them about the equipment, I often heard them refer to the most important part of the helicopter: the nut and pin that attaches the rotor to the fuselage. They referred to it as “the Jesus nut,” because if that nut failed, the rotor would fly off and all you could do was pray to Jesus as the chopper dropped like a rock to the ground—after which you’d get a chance to meet Jesus in person!
I think about that every time I read this text from Colossians, where Paul says that, in Jesus, “all things hold together” (1:17). He is the linkage between God and humanity, but like the inner workings of the Jesus nut, we might wonder how that all works. In what sense is Jesus both divine and human, and how does he represent both?
This was the question that the framers of the Nicene Creed had to deal with as they gathered in 325 AD. When you look at the creed, which we read earlier, you’ll notice that the longest section is about Jesus. That’s because the creed was designed to settle the question of Jesus’ relationship to God the Father—is he of the same substance as God or is he of similar, but lesser substance? Was Jesus pre-eminent and pre-existent with God the Father, or was he created by God? These were important questions—so important that they caused a great deal of strife in the Council as the majority, led by Athanansius, sought to defend the biblical position of Christ’s equality with God against the minority view of Arius who argued that Jesus was a created being less than God. Both sides used Scripture in their arguments, but the weight of the evidence was on the orthodox side.
Indeed, since the beginning of Christianity, Jesus has been seen as the one in whom both divinity and humanity fully dwell. That’s an important truth, not just in terms of getting the metaphysics right but also in terms of what that implies for God’s mission toward us and toward his creation. And so we turn today to a couple of Scriptures that give us a framework for understanding what it means when we say we believe in “one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father; God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God; begotten not made; of one being with the Father; through him all things were made.”
The situation in Colossae was a lot like that in which the framers of the creed found themselves. There were some who had come among the members of the Colossian church questioning the adequacy of Christ. They believed in the gnostic idea that matter was evil, and thus the incarnate Christ was inferior to God the Father (and even inferior to angels). Paul sets out to correct this heresy and he does so in chapter 1 by either composing or quoting what many scholars think was an early Christian hymn. Like many hymns, it uses poetry to express a deeper theology rather than a systematic explanation—much like Charles Wesley used poetry and hymnody to express the depth of John’s theological work for a larger audience.
I want to suggest that there are three important linkages in this passage that are essential for our understanding of who Jesus is according to the Scriptures and according to the creed. These linkages are as vital as the Jesus nut is to a helicopter—without them, things begin to fall apart. When we understand and maintain them, however, we begin to see God’s great plan for his creation unfold and we begin to see our part in it.
LINK 1: IN JESUS WE DISCOVER WHO GOD IS
The first linkage we learn from Paul is the linkage between Jesus and the Father. In other words, in Jesus we discover who God is. Look at verse 15: “He is the image of the invisible God, the one who first over all creation.” As Michael said last week when talking about God the Father, there is a certain amount of mystery about who God is. As another old hymn puts it, he is “immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.” But here we learn that while God is inaccessible to our eyes, God is not unknowable. Rather, God is made known in the person of Jesus Christ.
Paul borrows imagery here from Judaism, which saw “wisdom” as the image and representation of God and the means through which God brought forth his creation. Wisdom is often portrayed metaphorically in Hebrew literature as a woman, as in the book of Proverbs where she shouts in the streets calling the people to hear her wise counsel. Wisdom is not something created by God but rather is something that proceeds from God as part of God’s very nature.
This early hymn thus begins by saying that Jesus is the “eikon” or image of God—the invisible made visible—not a metaphor, as in Proverbs, but God literally incarnated in a human being; not a created being, but one who is part of God’s very nature. That’s what the word “begotten” actually means—it means the Son is not something made by the Father as part of creation, but is rather an extension or expansion, a person “out of” the Father’s own existence and nature.
In the beginning of John’s Gospel, we see this even more clearly. Another word for wisdom is “logos” or “Word” and John says that “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” The wisdom of God, the nature of God, is personified in Jesus, “the Word made flesh” who came to dwell among us. He is both with God and is God.
This is important because when Christians talk about God, we are not talking, as many in our world do, of a nebulous concept or force, nor are we talking about a god who is capricious, random, and out to get us. When we talk about God, we understand God through the person of Jesus. He is our linkage to the Father. “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” said Jesus to his disciples, “no one comes to the Father except by me.” One of them, Philip, asked him, “Lord, show us the Father and we will be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Don’t you get it Philip? If you have seen me, you have seen the Father!”
When we understand this linkage between Jesus and the Father, we understand that God’s very nature is good, loving, forgiving, and willing to sacrifice himself for us. The great Methodist missionary E. Stanley Jones puts it this way: “I look up through Jesus, the Son, and now I know what God is like. God is a Christ-like God, and if so, then God is a good God and trustable. I could think of nothing higher; I could be content with nothing less.”
This is the vital link. If Jesus is not God, then he doesn’t really matter, other than being an example of a human who lived a good life but ultimately died in futility. But if Jesus is God, then nothing else matters.
LINK 2: JESUS LINKS THE OLD CREATION AND THE NEW CREATION
But not only is Jesus a link to the Father, he is also a link between the old creation and the new creation. “For in him, all things in heaven and earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.” John adds that “All things came into being through him and without him not one thing came into being.”
Jesus Christ, says this old hymn, is the one in whom and for whom the creation was made in the first place. It was made as his dwelling place—God’s dwelling place. The linkages in Scripture are myriad. In Genesis, the creation account parallels that of building a temple—a place for God to dwell with his people. During the Exodus, the Israelites pitched a tabernacle tent as a dwelling place for God and would later build a temple, the interior of which looks like the Garden in Genesis—a place for God’s presence to dwell. In Jesus, John says, the Word became flesh and “dwelt” among us (literally, “tabernacled” among us). And the promise of Revelation is that Jesus will return again. “See, the home of God is among mortals,” says God. “He will dwell with them’ they will be his peoples and God himself will be with them.” There is no temple needed for the temple is “the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.”
God the Father, in and through God the Son, created the world good because he intends to dwell here. When we see the beauty of creation, we must remember that it’s like that because of Jesus. And when we see, on the other hand, how creation has been exploited and distorted by human sin, it’s then that we remember that Jesus came to redeem it and will come again to finish the work. The evil, sin, and death in the world isn’t what God intended from the beginning, but the Scriptures and creeds proclaim to us that, in Jesus, God has acted to heal the world. “The Jesus through whom the world was made in the first place is the same Jesus through whom the world has now been redeemed” (Wright 152). The old creation, corrupted by sin and death, will be made new.
LINK 3: JESUS LINKS US TO GOD
Which brings us to the third linkage—the linkage between Jesus and the good news of the cross and the resurrection. “He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead,” says the hymn, “so that he might come to have first place in everything.” The one in whom “fullness of God was pleased to dwell” went through death itself so that, through him, “God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross.”
The good news is that God, in the person of Jesus, chooses to deal with the sin and death that has invaded his good creation by going through death and out the other side in resurrection. Only God could do this on our behalf. No substitute could do it, as the Arians suggested. God has come to do the work himself, taking on the pain of our sin and carrying it through death to a victorious resurrection. That Jesus is the “firstborn from the dead” means that his resurrection is the foretaste of our own—that we will be renewed people in a renewed creation. What God intended from the beginning will be brought to reality in the end.
This is the good news proclaimed by the Scriptures and by the creeds: In Jesus, God become human, all things hold together.
In him, humanity and divinity hold together.
In him, heaven and earth hold together.
In him, God and humans are reconciled.
In him, creation holds together and finds its true purpose.
In him, the church is held together.
In him, the defeat of death and the promise of new life are held together.
In him, love and hope hold together.
Remove Jesus and everything is lost.
Pilots will tell you that a failure of the Jesus nut is a rare occurrence. Still, the crew chief checks it before nearly every flight to make sure that it’s working as intended. The life of the pilots, the crew, and the grunts inside all depend on it.
Our lives, both now and in the future, depend on the Jesus who is not a nut, but who is God. In a world where people are constantly trying to fashion a Jesus that suits their own agendas, our understanding of him needs constant maintenance and rechecking. Saying the creed, memorizing it, measuring false teachings against it, is vital.
Here’s an experiment for you to try this week. As you go about your daily life, listening to the news, having conversations with friends or overhearing conversations in the coffee shop, I invite you to listen for ways in which people refer to God. Politicians are doing it all the time, even referring to Jesus and Christianity, but are they referring to the God revealed in Jesus Christ? Are they referring to the Jesus who is of one being with the Father? My guess is that you’ll hear a lot of heresy out there if you’re listening closely! Ultimately, our job isn’t to simply argue for what’s in the creed, it’s to live it out and demonstrate how it looks in real life. The Jesus who is God in the flesh also reveals to us what it means to be truly human; to be a people on mission.
And that’s important because we also remember that the purpose of Jesus isn’t merely keep us aloft in a spiritual sense, just like the purpose of the Jesus nut isn’t only to keep the chopper in the air. The ultimate purpose of a Jesus nut is to keep the helicopter flying so that it can carry out its mission of ferrying troops into battle. Jesus’ purpose is to save us, but then to convey us into combat against the forces of sin and death. The Scriptures and the creeds remind us that God, in Christ, has a mission to redeem his good creation, and he calls us to join him in that mission. It can be a dangerous mission, but one that will be ultimately victorious because, in the cross and the empty tomb, he has already won.
To follow him, however, we must be clear about who he is—the one in whom all things hold together!
