The Father’s Son become lowly human servant offering up his own life for us.  In doing so, he brought to an end the old age under the power of sin and death.  Not only did he die for us, we also died with him and death itself also died. Following on from that dramatic event, the Father raised Jesus from the dead as new man in new creation.  He was raised for us and we were raised with him.

These sentences set out something of what God has done for us in Jesus.  And yet, we must recognise that God and his reconciling acts cannot be contained within our sentences.  Through our sentences we try to express faithfully all that God has done in Jesus; but it isn’t reducible to ideas, theories and arguments. Who can say what is unspeakable, and who can describe what no eye has seen?

All our sentences about God have their truth, not in themselves, but only in him to whom they refer.  And so, by the Spirit’s enlightenment, we must pass beyond our sentences to the actual person of Christ himself allowing his person to continually remould our understanding of him. As the Spirit of Christ takes us ever deeper into the mystery of Christ we see more and more who he is and what he has done for us.  Even so, the fullness of Christ always remains hidden from our view.  And the more we gaze on him the more the hiddenness grows.  While the more we encounter the one who is hidden, the more he opens himself to us beyond our sentences.