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.
