Advent - In the Beginning - Who was Jesus?

The Creation of the Universe was a secret event. No-one was there to witness or record it. We don’t know what it looked like, and we can never find out. It will be forever a mysterious event.

Similarly the birth of Jesus was a secret event. It began with a mysterious, miraculous conception. It was hidden, secret, we can never find out what happened or how it happened. Even the fact of the Virgin Birth is a matter of dispute, or disrepute, or trust, or faith.

Even more mysterious is the co-existence of God and Man in Jesus. It took the early church hundreds of years to wrestle with this duality in Christ. Some argued that he was wholly divine - but then his death was not a human death and neither was his life a human life. It only appeared to be so. Others argued that Jesus was only human and not divine at all. Some groups on the fringes of Christianity still believe that today.

The early church convened several Councils to wrestle with the various beliefs and rule on the truth of the matter. At Nicaea in 325AD they produced the Nicene Creed which declared that God and Christ were the same. But this was not a clear statement and the dispute rumbled on until the Council of 451AD at Chalcedon which declared that Christ was perfect God and perfect man, those two natures being in one person.

That’s a shorthand description of the Council’s deliberations about the nature of Christ but clarifies for us that Jesus of Nazareth was fully divine and fully human. He was born as a human baby, of a human mother Mary, grew up in a normal, unremarkable childhood, until the age of 30, when he was baptised by his second cousin John the Baptist, who was born to Elizabeth some 6 months before Jesus was born. His three year ministry culminated in his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, after which the Holy Spirit was given to all believers at that first Pentecost.

Who was Jesus? He was Man and God, and he lived, died, and rose again, in our midst.