God is one of us
The glory of humanity over the angels
God is one of us
O Lord, raise up (we pray thee) thy power, and come among us, and with great might succour us; that whereas, through our sins and wickedness, we are sore let and hindered in running the race that is set before us, thy bountiful grace and mercy may speedily help and deliver us; through the satisfaction of thy Son our Lord, to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost be honour and glory, world without end. Amen.
Associated passages: Philippians 4.4-7, John 1.19-28
On the Sunday before Christmas, it is natural that our remembrance of Christ’s first coming would turn into a prayer for God to come among us again. On Christmas day, we will remember how God came among us, that he came among us to save us from our sins, and that he saved us from our sins so that we may walk in good works.
This Collect, in preparation, follows the same formula. We pray that God would:
- come among us in power and might, to succour us.
- save us from our sins and wickedness, which hinder us.
- enable us to run the race which is set before us through Jesus’ satisfaction.[1]
God came among us
In Philippians 4, Paul is encouraging the Philippian church to rejoice, to not be anxious, and to be thankful. Why are these verses associated with the Sunday before Christmas? Because within this exhortation he adds a short sentence: The Lord is at hand (Phil. 4:5).
Jesus is among us today. Not physically, but by his Spirit, by his presence, and by his power he stands among us. At one time Jesus did stand among us physically – and he will stand among us again. In John 1, the priests and Levites are questioning John the Baptist about what he’s doing. “I baptise with water, but among you stands one you do not know,” he answered. The one who stands among us is the one who John is not worthy to even untie the strap of his sandal. He is God himself, in the flesh.
Have you ever wondered why God didn’t stop when he made the angels? Angels don’t suffer in the way we do; angels don’t have to deal with a physical body. Josef Pieper observers that “an angel cannot be courageous because it is not vulnerable. To be brave means to be ready to sustain a wound.” If they remain in the righteousness God gives them, they won’t ever suffer a wound. Do you ever wish God had made you an angel, so that you never had to suffer or be sad?
I don’t claim to know why God made more than angels, but I at least know why I’m content with not being one. It is because God became a human. The glory of humanity over the angels is that no angel can ever say “God is one of us.”
We were lost in our sins and had abandoned the natural righteousness and happiness God created us in. So, God raised up his power, he came among us, and he gave us succour. Because of that fact we can now “not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let our requests be made known to God” (Phil. 4:6).
God saved us from our sins
In the verse immediately following the associated passage in John, John the Baptist sees Jesus and proclaims Jesus’ purpose: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”
God never rejected humanity, and he continues to not reject people. In fact, it is God himself who will save us. “He will redeem Israel from all his iniquities” (Ps. 130:8). Paul says that “if we are faithless, he remains faithful” (2 Tim. 2:13). We were “dead in our trespasses” (Eph. 2:5). We are the ones who reject God. Those who it seems like God ‘rejects’ are really those who do not listen to his call to them. Like the Jews who stoned Stephen, they are “stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, they always resist the Holy Spirit” (Acts 7:51).
Thankfully, God has not left us with uncircumcised hearts and ears. If you believe in Jesus, he has worked in you by the Holy Spirit to replace your stony, unfeeling heart with a sensitive heart. The Collect prays that even though ‘through our sins and wickedness, we are sore let and hindered,’ God’s ‘bountiful grace and mercy may speedily help and deliver us.’
God’s grace is bountiful. There is always more of it; it will never run out. What other things would you call ‘bountiful?’ Perhaps a feast where there is more food available than everyone could possibly eat. Does that remind you of Christmas day? Even when everyone is full, there is still food on the table. That’s what bountiful means - to have more than enough, to have abundance. And this is what God’s grace is like. There is more than enough grace for everything we need. God’s grace is sufficient for us always. Through God’s grace, our sins can be forgiven, we can be transformed, and we can have a life without lack.
God gave us good works to do
In what way are we ‘sore let and hindered?’ The Collect says we are ‘hindered in running the race that is set before us.’ Someone who runs a race runs to win a prize. Our word athlete comes from the Ancient Greek word for prize: ἆθλον (athlon). This prize is what Paul means when he explains that he disciplines himself “that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (Phil. 3:10).
Paul’s prize was twofold: to know God and to be like Him.
We run a race with the prize of eternal life. The prize of eternal life is to ‘know the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent’ (John 17:3). And knowing God is our happiness. As Thomas Aquinas writes, “final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision [knowledge] of the Divine Essence… For perfect happiness the intellect needs to reach the very Essence of the First Cause. And thus it will have its perfection through union with God as with that object, in which alone man's happiness consists.”
We run a race by doing the good works which God has given for us to do. In Ephesians Paul explains that “we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10). Our happiness comes from living the life God has given to us, to walk in the virtues of humanity. Aristotle says that “human good turns out to be an activity of Soul exhibiting virtue, and if there is more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete” (Ethics, 1098a). Our good is to be active in exhibiting (doing) the best and most complete virtues we can.
Because of sin, human nature was marred and broken by sin. God became a human in Jesus, so that the image of God in man can be restored to its original righteousness and virtue. This means the enlightening of our minds to the truth of God’s existence and his character, and our conformity to that character. We can partake in the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4). We become deiform, as Aquinas says.
Jesus was born so that we could know God, and by knowing Him become like Him. In the classic Athansian phrase, ‘He was made man that we might be made God’ (On the Incarnation 54:3). Being like God means doing good and being happy about doing it. This Christmas let’s once again remember what God becoming a man means: we are saved from our sins so that we can do good works, and be happy.