Jesus the Christ

“Jesus Christ” isn’t a full name, as in someone having a first and last name. “Christ” is a title. It means messiah. So as we do some thinking about Jesus, it’s actually important to understand that Jesus was the Christ - but not always. That’s because Jesus was limited in time - he was born of the Virgin Mary. Before that, well, he wasn’t Jesus.

Of course the Christ has always existed from all eternity past. In the verse just before we learn that “the Son is the exact representation of God’s glory” (Hebrews 1:3) we find the author mentioning that “through him God made the universe” (Hebrews 1:2. The reference here is to the pre-incarnate Christ, to the second person of the Trinity, whom we know as Jesus. But since Jesus hadn’t taken on flesh and blood yet, it’s more accurate to talk about the Christ who was present at creation. In fact, the Gospel of John starts off in exactly this way - articulating how it was ‘the Word’ that was a part of creating the universe and that ‘the Word’ took on flesh and bone and became Jesus.

As we talked about on Sunday, these can feel a bit like trivial mind games. But there is some practical implications. For many of us, it can feel very comforting to know that ‘the Son of God’ in Hebrews 1 could just as accurately (more accurately?) be called ‘the Child of God.’ That’s because just like people sometimes use ‘mankind’ to mean ‘humankind’ in the first century they used ‘son’ to mean ‘child.’ It’s not necessarily a gendered word. And for those who’ve never felt close to Christ for reasons attached to Christ always being represented as a male, well, it can be quite freeing to experience Christ as female or non-binary.

If you’re willing today, would you be open to trying a prayer to Christ that does not rely on Christ being imaged as male? See how that impacts your prayer. How does it make you feel? Where is there resistance in you? Is there some new freedom? What do these things tell you?