Places of God's Revelation 2

Places of God’s Revelation 2

Revelation, Fellowship, and the Holy Spirit

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            In this blog I wish to write a little bit about the sort of revelation of God in Christ which takes place in the Christian life. Sometimes we carry vague notions of what we might expect when we imagine God revealing Himself to us in Jesus Christ.

            We might associate the word “revelation” with dreams, visions, or a dramatic tearing down of the veil between the boundaries of our seen world with the unseen worlds of the unseen spiritual worlds surrounding us. We might imagine dramatic revelations startlingly different from our ordinary human experiences.

But from the Christian perspective God’s greatest revelation of Himself came when God entered human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus’ humanity was an expression of weakness and in so many ways of ordinariness. He slept, experienced hunger and thirst, grieved and got angry. I suspect that if we had been around him our thoughts would not be focused on how he was sinless. Would a sinless man appear that way to our imperfect understanding of reality? I suspect that if we had been among the disciples we would have been wondering, “Should he be putting himself in such a compromising place with that woman? We might have been thoroughly embarrassed when he seemed to get angry in the temple going around saying to those present “You have turned my father’s house of prayer into a robber’s den.” Instead of seeing him as sinless we might well have been left wondering if he had done something he shouldn’t have done or failed to do something he should have done. But this seemingly ordinary life lived in our midst would gradually come to be understood by us as the life of God in the fullness and the weakness of our shared humanity. We would have begun by imagining that God’s revelation of Himself would come in fire, lightning bolt, fierce wind, or mighty earthquake but instead it came in the soft weak voice of a whisper.

            Jesus used St. Thomas’ doubting to teach all of us an important lesson about God’s revelation of His Son to us. St. Thomas wanted to see the risen Christ and declared he wouldn’t believe unless he saw Jesus. When Jesus appeared to him he began to speak to all of the apostles about how they would soon be taking the word of His resurrection to the ends of the earth. They had been allowed to see him. None of them had fully believed until they actually saw him. Thomas was not of essence different from Peter or the disciple journeying with Peter towards Emmaus. They were discouraged and hopeless until they recognized Jesus as they ate together. It is in this context that he spoke to Thomas, whose doubts were representative of the disciples and not unique to Thomas. Speaking directly to Thomas, the disciples all heard him speaking to them as he said, “Thomas, because you have seen me you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” (John 20:29) The revelation we are discussing which comes to Christians in this season of human history is primarily the blessed unseen revelation that Jesus described when speaking to Thomas. It is a revelation that comes to us in the power of the Holy Spirit through the Word of the Apostles and through our participation in the fellowship of the community that has come to believe the message whose substance we have never seen with our earthly eyes.

            Our Protestant and Evangelical emphasis on “Sola Scriptura” has sometimes created unintended consequences among some of us Protestants. We have tended to turn the Christian faith into an academic exercise reduced to “open your Bibles to chapter and verse and this is how God speaks to us. But St. John in his first epistle describes his declaration of the Gospel as an invitation to us to be part of a fellowship that is a fellowship with God the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. The Gospel message is not simply “believe this and you shall live” but instead is expressed as an invitation to a community in words like “hear us and become joined to the fellowship where God’s Son dwells in our midst”. John says, “That which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.” (I John 1:3)

This is why the early Church described that salvation was not experienced outside of the church. This did not necessarily mean that the early church was completely hopeless about the persons who had never heard the message of Christ. But it did mean that they understood that salvation was not solely a belief in a doctrinal message, but an invitation to participation in a fellowship connected to the people of God in whose midst Jesus Christ had made his dwelling. Salvation therefore, specifically in the experience of it on earth, was unthinkable apart the invitation of the Gospel message to be a part of the community of God’s people. We have been invited to be made part of a community which has been witnesses of the incarnation and the resurrection and the ascension of Jesus Christ. That which was granted to be seen and handled by the Apostles; has been made ours through this fellowship. We have been granted in this community, the Church, to be connected to one another with Christ dwelling in our midst. It is in this context that we will be able to see these dramatically not dramatic ways in which God manifests his presence in Christ to us. He does this in the quietness of the word expressed through the Scriptures, in the sacraments, and within the Church.