There’s a story about a young pianist who was working on a piece by Bach. After the recital, she said to her teacher, “Thank goodness we’ve finished Bach.” Her teacher looked at her and said firmly, “My dear, one never finishes Bach.” Christians have the tendency to approach the fundamental truths of our faith in this way, as if there comes a point where we can look at them and say, “I’ve learned this—I can move on to the next thing.” The truth that we’re saved by God’s grace alone and we live by his grace alone, for instance, is something we need to keep coming back to and re-learning because the sinful part of us keeps pushing it out of our minds.
That’s one reason it’s a good thing we have those headings of the VSF creed up on the wall: we need the continual reminder that God is bigger. We do well to take that a bit further and remind ourselves that Jesus is bigger. The universal temptation is to make God safe, and perhaps especially to make Jesus safe—or maybe it’s just especially easy to do with Jesus. We think in comparisons, and so when we read the stories of Jesus as a human being, we try to fit him into our normal frame of reference. Even if we believe he was fully God, we have no model anywhere in view for what that looks like, and so our natural tendency is to imagine Jesus as merely human. John’s aim in beginning his gospel is to write about Jesus in a way that prevents that tendency from obscuring our view of the greatness and uniqueness of Jesus.
