FATHER AND SON
John
10:24-30 “…If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.”
Jesus answered, "I did tell you, but you do not believe… I and the Father
are one."
The humility of Christ is not the moderation of keeping
one’s exact place in the scale of being, but rather that of absolute dependence
on God and absolute trust in Him, with the consequent ability to remove
mountains. The secret of the meekness and the gentleness of Christ lies in his
relation to God…. Thus any one of the virtues of Jesus may be taken as the key
to the understanding of his character and teaching; but each is intelligible in
its apparent radicalism only as a relation to God. It is better, of course, not
to attempt to delineate him by describing one of his excellences but rather to
take them all together, those to which we have referred and others. In either
case, however, it seems evident that the strangeness, the heroic stature, the
extremism and sublimity of this person, considered morally, is due to that
unique devotion to God and to that single-hearted trust in Him which can be
symbolized by no other figure of speech so well as by the one which calls him
Son of God.
Hence belief in Jesus Christ by men in their various
cultures always means belief in God. No one can know the Son without
acknowledging the Father. To be related in devotion and obedience to Jesus
Christ is to be related to the One to whom he undeviatingly points. As Son of
God he points away from the many values of man’s social life to the One who
alone is good; from the many powers which men use and on which they depend to
the One who alone is powerful; from the many times and seasons of history with
their hopes and fears to the One who is Lord of all times and is alone to be
feared and hoped for; he points away from all that is conditioned to the
Unconditioned. He does not direct attention away from this world to another;
but from all worlds, present and future, material and spiritual, to the One who
creates all worlds, who is the Other of all worlds.
