The world has rejected God and turned far away from him. Nevertheless, the world is not left to its own devices. God actually entered the world in Jesus to turn the world around. Jesus, the lowly man, is himself true God acting in the world to bring us back home. He is not a mere “appearance” of the true and proper divine being beyond himself. He is God himself acting in the world for the sake of our reconciliation.

But doesn’t Jesus, as lowly servant, contradict who and what God actually is? Well, he certainly contradicts all our human ideas about the divine being. For our own natural projections about God turn God into a remote and removed being. One who cannot possibly become a lowly and suffering human. But Jesus is the true God who decided with his Father in the Spirit that he wanted to be with us as lowly suffering servant to bring us back home. So, the only God we know is the one who is willing to be lowly as the suffering servant to take us back to himself. He chooses humiliation in lowly service to reconcile us.

In this action within the world and for the world God shows us who he actually is and what he is like. We do not now speculate about what the divine being can or cannot do because he has done what he wants to do showing us what the true God is like. So, the only God we know is the one who is willing to be lowly as the suffering servant to take us back to himself. And before the true God who is lowly servant we bow in awe and wonder.