There are, depending on how you count them, about 37 recorded miracles performed by Jesus. Some of them echo miracles performed by prophets of the Old Testament, especially multiplying food, healing lepers, controlling weather and even raising the dead, all of which Elijah and Elisha did. But the unique miracle that Jesus performed was walking on water. Nobody had done that before or since. And as we learn in Matthew, the immediate effect is that the disciples worship Jesus and say, "Truly you are the Son of God!"
Today it is basic theology that Christ is fully God and fully man. In the first century that was not a obvious solution to what folks encountered in Jesus. They thought he was a prophet, possibly the Messiah, but that didn't necessarily translate to him being divine. There were various ideas of the nature of the Messiah but God Incarnate was not one. To Jews this would seem blasphemous and sure enough, whenever Jesus says things like "I and my Father are one" or "Before Abraham was, I am" the reaction of his critics was to start picking up stones in order to kill him. So it took a lot for even the disciples to wrap their heads around the idea that Jesus was divine. Even after walking on water, it didn't really hit home until after his resurrection.
For us, Jesus' divinity is a given. And yet, our minds are so influenced by the concept that things belong to either one category or another, that we tend to at least overemphasize one of Jesus' natures. And that was the problem the early church had. In the first 300 years of Christianity, the hot topic was the relationship of Jesus' divine and human natures. I'm not going to get into details because that would mean first explaining the Greco-Roman philosophy of nature, spirit, mind and soul. Suffice it to say, that various solutions were suggested. Some made Jesus a victim of multiple personality but most seemed to have Jesus' divine nature totally override his human nature.
Arius was a Christian priest who came up with a different solution. Jesus was a lesser god, created by God the Father before the rest of creation. Thus the Trinity was an improper picture of the relationship of the Father and the Son. When Jesus says the Father is greater than he, he is not talking merely about his present state as a human being but his pre-human state as well.
The problem is that Arianism essentially makes Christians polytheists. And it means that when we are dealing with Jesus we are not dealing directly with God but a subordinate, albeit a highly placed one. God did not become human; a lesser god did. God did not die for the world; a lesser god did.
The advantage of this is that it does do away with the Trinity which is a confusing concept for many. But what if we did that in science? What if we ignored the fact that light acts as both a particle and as a wave and came down definitively on one side or the other? Physicists would object that we would be ignoring a whole lot of data for the sake of making a complex piece of reality easier to understand and digest.
What is the Biblical data? That the Father is God. That the Son is God. That the Holy Spirit is God. And that there is one God. The Trinity doesn't so much explain this as preserve the paradox. It is like maintaining that light is both a particle and a wave and we just have to deal with it. The same is true of the theologians who debated Arianism and decided to maintain the paradox of the Trinity and the paradox of the 2 natures of Christ in the Nicene Creed. "We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father. Through him all things were made." Once you have that clear in mind, that on God's plane of existence 3 persons can be one being (something hinted at and reflected in the Genesis account of male and female becoming one flesh or organism) then the story of Christmas becomes even more marvelous. God did not delegate our redemption to a lesser being but took upon himself the task of saving us. The One who made you died for you.
Translator J. B. Phillips in his book, "Your God is Too Small," put it this way: that Jesus is the infinite transcendent God whom we cannot truly imagine focused in terms we understand, those of time and space and human personality. In Jesus we see what God is like, especially his character. He is, as the Methodists would say, Holy Love. And he is now one of us. So just as it is mind-blowing to contemplate that all of the universe was, prior to the Big Bang, compressed into an infinitesimally small singularity, so too at Christmas we realize that in a manger in Bethlehem the Creator of the universe became a creature within it, a baby, a thing of flesh and blood, who fed at his mother's breast and had to be changed. Just because that's hard to understand doesn't make it less true. We just have to deal with it.
There is a meme going around Facebook, a Someecard that says, "I'm not short, I'm concentrated awesome!!" That was the infant in the feeding trough: Concentrated Awesome. The mind-blowing power of all creation in one tiny creature. God become human. That's an explosive combination. What happens next? Well, the last time anything close to that much power was that compact, it triggered the creation of the universe. This time it is primed to set off the New Creation, the grand restoration of all things as God intended, beginning with us. So at Advent our message is: watch out, world! Concentrated Awesome is coming!
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