Tell me all your thoughts on God...

Cause I would really like to meet her!

Jesus is God enfleshed into history.

Upon the stormy waters of Matthew 14, Jesus’ disciples look out and see Jesus, but they do not recognize him. Welcome to the story of Jesus’ life, welcome to God’s experience throughout Church history. We look out into a stormy world from our little spot of security, and we see something happening, we see God moving, but we fail to recognize him.

Throughout history, the Church has consistently called God in the storm: false, heretical, even blasphemous, or simply, untimely.

So the declaration went against Jesus in one way or another through his earthly ministry.

Yet, he set himself up on a stormy night, to be once again over the waters as he was so long ago at creation, and to his disciples struggling to discern Jesus as truly a move of God, Jesus declared that he was God. The imagery was in place to stir their minds as they didn’t even ask “who” was upon the water, but they were considering “what” it was that was upon the water.

Jesus answered them, and told them more about “what” was upon the water than “who” was upon the water, as he did not give them his own name.

To their bewildered minds, struggling to figure out what it was that they were seeing, Jesus said to them, “I am.”

Matthew’s gospel is a recreation of the entire First Testament. It starts with the same Greek phrase as the creation story in the Greek Septuagint that Matthew would have been familiar with. And just as the Hebrew Scriptures close with the book of Chronicles recording a kingly proclamation to the people of God to go and build the kingdom, so the Gospel of Matthew closes with a kingly proclamation to go and build the kingdom.

Just like God gave a law on a mountain, so Jesus gives a law on a mountain. Moses got five major sections in the First Testament, so Matthew gives Jesus five major discourses in the gospel. All through Matthew’s gospel, he is placing Jesus into the First Testament. Jesus as a child is Israel going into and out of Egypt. Jesus providing enough food for the 5000 who followed him into the wilderness is God providing food to Israel long ago in the wilderness.

As Matthew creates these connections that make Jesus the focal point of the First Testament, it should not escape that Matthew 14 holds a retelling of Jesus as God hovering over the stormy waters of Genesis 1:2 as the wind blew. And as the picture of God over the waters in Genesis 1:2 is immediately followed by the appearance of light, so Jesus is upon the water as the light of dawn breaks into the darkness. Thus, Genesis 1:2-3 is wrapped up in Jesus upon the water.

Aside from Genesis coming to mind when we read of the disciples seeing Jesus upon the water, the story of the exodus is still upon our minds as well from the feeding of the 5000. And the exodus story would be upon the disciples’ minds as they grew in understanding and then reflected back on the feeding of the 5000 and then being in the boat. So, Jesus - as God upon the waters - does not tell them, “It’s ok, it is your rabbi, Jesus.”

Jesus says, “It’s ok, ‘I Am.’”

These are the same words that Jesus calls to at other times, in other gospels, but Matthew looks to this occasion to mark the “I Am” claim of Jesus, as the books of Genesis and Exodus are in our minds.

Jesus is claiming to be God. As the disciples are trying to figure out what they are looking at, Jesus says what he is, the I Am.

This is the name that God gave itself, when Moses asked who he should say sent him to Pharaoh.

This name that God chose for itself, really translates to: “I exist”

In other words, God says, “I am existence itself, call me ‘Existence.’”

We should understand this in the same way that many in the early church understood it: everything that exists, exists in extension from God.

That is, God is existence, and he lends of that existence to all things.

From this, we realize that God directly suffers when his existence extended into creation is used to do harm. He also directly suffers when any extension of his existence is abused or even killed. Jesus came to expose unseen things, and one of those things was to show that through human history, God has been crucified in one form or another as humans are killed. As God is in all things, so God suffers all things.

This is not pantheism, that all is God. This is panentheism, that God is in all things - necessarily in all things.

Colossians 1:15-20 tells us that Jesus was before anything else, all else was made by him, and all is sustained by him.

Hebrews 1:3 puts it as, the creative word is also the sustaining word. In other words, all things do not self-exist, but depend on being sustained. To exist, all things depend, in every moment, upon receiving existence.

Thus, God is Existence, and is the existence of all things.

God is neither male or female, as both sexes are equally in his image.

God is also a “he.” In the gendered languages of the ancient near east, the God of Christianity also became known as “he.”

God is also referred to as a Father, as the source of the seed for creation, and also as the seed source for Jesus himself.

However, lest we believe that God is masculine, God is also referred to with female characteristics in Scripture.

Due to the dependent existence of all things upon Existence itself, the early church even spoke of creation as existing within the womb of God.

Humanity has found it difficult to know God through, even as we exist from God.

This is why Jesus came.

Colossians 1:15 tells us that Jesus makes the invisible God, visible.

Colossians 1:20 tells us that Jesus was God, all of God, in God’s entirety. In other words, there is no part of God that is unlike Jesus. To see Jesus is to visibly see the invisible God, entirely.

Hebrews 1:3 tells us that Jesus is the “radiance” or the “brightness” of God’s doxa (Gk: δόξα). This Greek word, doxa, refers to “glory,” but it carries with it the idea of who one is as a person, or their reputation. In the New Testament, doxa in the context of God might be best understood to refer to the all encompassing, glorious, divine property of who God is. Thus, as Paul says that God is perceived from the human side darkly, Jesus is God in 8k clarity to us. Jesus is God shown to us unlike any other human could ever see God on their own.

Hebrews 1:3 also tells us that Jesus is the charakter (Gk: χαρακτήρ) of God’s substance, God’s essence. This Greek word, charakter, is obviously where we get our English word “character.” Its meaning in the Greek conveys the idea of an exact replica or a reproduction - in every way, with no variation. Jesus is presented here as an in-the-flesh copy - or facsimile - of God. To see and know Jesus is to see and know God.

Any variance of believing God to be anything unlike Jesus is wrong - it cannot be.

As Jesus says, “To see me is to see the Father. There is nothing about the Father that is any different from what you see and hear from me.” (John 14:8-11)

There can be no claim that God or the Father acts “upon” Jesus, or counter to Jesus, as if the Father is separate from Jesus. As Jesus climbs upon the cross, to be enthroned in his glory, and as he gives the honor of sitting at his right and his left - not to James and John - but to repentant and unrepentant sinners - criminals, we see the Father climbing upon the cross. And as Jesus petitions his Father for forgiveness for his killers, the Father’s voice says, “Of course Son, because your words are only ever my own words.”

As Brian Zahnd has put it:

God is like Jesus

God has always been like Jesus

We have not always known what God is like

But now we do

God is like Jesus

Jesus, naked, fully revealed upon the cross is God and the Father fully revealed, as they return mercy for violence, and literally pour their heart out into the world as we pierce it.

It is from this starting place, the revelation of Jesus, that proper theology starts, and all is tried, tested, and proven.

Jesus has come as the clear, culminating, and even corrective revelation of who and what God is.