Wednesday 7th December
Read Hebrews 1:5-6
“For to which of the angels did God ever say,
‘You are my Son;
today I have become your Father’?
Or again,
‘I will be his Father,
and he will be my Son’?
6 And again, when God brings his firstborn into the world, he says,
‘Let all God’s angels worship him.’” (NIVUK)
Early arguments about the nature of the incarnation revealed many logical challenges for those wise in the faith to confront. They all revolved around the paradox of the incarnation – that Jesus was both God and man – when logic says that God and man could not be more opposite in nature. Each of these attempts sought to diminish in some way the fullness of humanity or the fullness of deity.
Many sought to establish that, through the nature of language, Jesus must be created because He existed after the Father, as a son exists after a father. The pastor to the Hebrews addressed concerns that the Son was merely ‘created’, like angels, by drawing on the richness of Scripture. We could spend many weeks mining those riches – but in the spirit of learning from the wisdom of those before us – let us consider the words of Bishop Ambrose of Milan – the one whom God used to draw the great Augustine to faith! He writes to rebut the Arian heresy that as human son follows human father, the divine Son must be lesser than the divine Father.
“God has revealed Himself as a Father—even in the pagan mythologies we see the idea of Fatherhood implicit in Godhead. If the gods of the heathen did not beget after their kind, they begat heroes and demigods. But created existences cannot claim to be the first and proper object of the Divine Father’s love. They are for a time only, and with them Eternal Love could not be satisfied. If God be a true Father, then, He must beget His Like—His Son must be equal to Him in nature, that is, what is true of the Father, what is essential in the Father, as God, must be true or essential in the Son also. Therefore the son must be divine, eternal. But the generation (γέννησις) of the Son is not an event in time. It is a fact, a truth, out of, beyond time, belonging to the divine and eternal and spiritual, not to the temporal and created, order. “To whom amongst the angels does He ever say, Thou art My Son; this day have I begotten Thee? and again, I will be a Father to Him, and He shall be a Son to Me? when, again, He brings His first-begotten into the world” (i.e., reveals Him to the created universe as its King), He says: “And let all God’s angels worship Him” (Heb. i. 5–6). Since the Divine Son, then, is eternal, even as the Divine Father, the one cannot be before or after the other; the two Persons are co-existent, co-eternal, co-equal. And the mysterious genesis, also, is not an event that happened once, taking place in a series of events, it is ever happening, it is always and for ever.” (Ambrose of Milan, Ambrose: Select Works and Letters, (Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace))
Reflect on one of his prayers to that same Father.
O Lord, who has mercy upon all, take away from me my sins,
and mercifully kindle in me the fire of Your Holy Spirit.
Take away from me the heart of stone,
and give me a heart of flesh,
a heart to love and adore You,
a heart to delight in You,
to follow and to enjoy You,
for Christ’s sake.
St Ambrose of Milan, 337–397 AD
