Love: Expressed

‘A critique of humanity’ – I find that a fascinating way to think about Superman’s alter-ego; that the Man of Steel’s false persona as the ‘mild-mannered’ reporter for the Daily Planet newspaper was just his modelled expression of his assessment on the human condition. Could it be that when we look at Kent, we are given this outsider’s opinion of what it means to be flesh? If so, then it’s almost like he’s mocking us in a way that says: ‘I can be like you, but you can never be like me’.

Which is a shame, because wouldn't we want to become like Superman – excluding the obvious embarrassment of wearing underpants on the outside of your trousers?

I’ll be real with you – if someone, tomorrow, offered us a single injection that would give us the same abilities as Superman (minus the x-ray vision, because I'm not certain we could be trusted with that), then I’d be extremely tempted to say, ‘Yes’. Wouldn't most of us take it? And I'm certain that many of us would accept that injection with the right motives; we’d hope that in possessing those great powers we would also possess the abilities to transform our world for the better. Which is revealing, isn't it? Because deep down, in our admission to this want, aren't we then also agreeing with Superman’s critique of our flesh-life condition? Does Superman’s expression through Clark Kent maybe confirm our paranoia that the human condition is weak, impotent and ill-equipped to make the world a better place? We want to be like him because we feel that being like us isn't enough.

But what if our humanity is a gift and not a curse? What if we already possess the means to change the world for the better? And what if those means aren't located in being able to fly or in some mighty latent strength within our muscles, but within our capacity to love?

What if The Beatles were right, and love really is all that is needed?

I believe Jesus gives us a better critique of the human condition than Superman; a divine critique. A critique that, on the one hand, does point out our failings, weaknesses and our lack of courage, but at the same time also gives us hope, hope that the reality we seek isn't to be found in some ‘power-giving injection’, but in the lived-out expression of what it really means to be human, to live as an image bearer of the divine. If we seriously considered what the early followers of Jesus believed and declared about Him, and what Jesus said about Himself, then we are presented with an extraordinary reality: that Jesus is God in flesh…

… God became like us.

The creator, an outsider, came and made his home with us; walked with us; talked with us; ate with us; wept with us; laughed with us; died like us. As one writer within the New Testament puts it:

‘For in Christ the fullness of God lives in a human body…’

And yet within that manifestation, even though He does do some rather extraordinary things like walking on water and turning water into wine, we don’t see Jesus flying at the speed of light around the world in order to reverse time, nor do we read of Him shooting laser beams from his eyes. In fact, most of the time, He’s pretty ‘normal-looking’ in both His appearance and His behaviour. He’s human. I have to mention this, and not in any way to demean God’s greatness, but Jesus isn't God’s alter ego, like Clark Kent is to Superman! Jesus is fully God, and yet fully human. Where Superman comes and shows us what we can never be, God comes and shows us what we’re called to be. I love this, and I appreciate that the subtlety of this might not be obvious, but God didn't seem to mind being made of skin and bones. And actually, if we think about it, and when we look at His life amongst us, He does an awful lot through what we would consider a restraint to our capacity. We would believe that we need to be more than human to transform our world. But God, through the incarnation, enters into creation. He embodies it. He embraces it. He enjoys it. And through it He expresses, not only who He is, but also what humanity is called to be. In Jesus, we’re given a clear picture of what the partnership between human and divine is supposed to look like. In Jesus, God enters creation and displays its potential. In Jesus, we’re shown a human life lived in all its fullness. In Jesus, we’re given the physical demonstration of the early church’s motif that ‘God is love’.

Jesus is love: expressed.

Please understand, this isn't going to be a book about performing miracles. I don’t know whether you've ever seen a ‘supernatural’ miracle or not. I don’t know whether you’ll participate in something like raising the dead, or healing a blind man or anything else that is naturally beyond our human capacity. But I know this: that we are all capable of love, and that it is only love, a divine love expressed through a divine image, that can change the world. More than this, I believe that this love has already come amongst us and has already changed the world, and continues to change this world. How this has happened, and how this continues to happen, is part of the substance of this book – but not the only part.