Arius (256 – 336) was a church leader whose starting point for thinking about God was Greek philosophy rather than Jesus. This way of imagining God was stronger to Arius than anything he could see in Jesus.  Arius always thought that Jesus was not “the real thing”, but only a lesser version of the real “stuff” of divinity  It seems to me, that too many of us may fall into this way of thinking.  We may not go along fully with Arius, but, like Arius, we might think we already know what God is like before we ever think about Jesus.  And so, we may always look above and beyond Jesus.

Jesus does not fit into most of the ideas about God that human philosophy and religion have developed. He is God as human. He was utterly humble in serving the lowliest people, washing their feet and embracing the outcasts He humbled himself by going to the very lowest place by dying a shameful death as a common criminal. Jesus will always disturb and outrage human ideas about God, religion and the universe.

Nevertheless, the New Testament declares Jesus as the true Face of God. Thomas Torrance writes, “When we look into the face of Jesus Christ and see there the very face of God, we know we have not seen and cannot see God anywhere else or in another way but in him, for he is God himself become human, and there is no God except the God who has come and meets us in Jesus”.

Truly, Jesus is God with a human face.  We don’t try to get behind him so that we may move beyond him.