Years ago, while reading a paraphrase of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the resurrected Jesus on the first Easter morning, I was arrested by this sentence: “Hearing her name spoken, Mary turned and saw her Creator” (John 20:16).
Startled, I looked up from the page. My first reaction was that this paraphrase had gone a step too far. Never before had I heard Jesus referred to as our—indeed my—‘Creator.’ Of course, I know that everything was created through Jesus (John 1:3; Col 1:16). But to flat out call Him the ‘Creator’—that took me by surprise.
In that moment I realized I had a low view of the second person of the Trinity. I believed in the incarnation, in God becoming flesh, so I knew that Jesus is God, but to equate or identify Jesus with the Creator made me uncomfortable.
Here we get into the mystery of the Trinity: three persons in one God. To be sure, each of these divinities has different roles, but what if that is just the case in our own minds, to help us distinguish them? If each of them is God, then do they not each possess all the attributes of the others? And yet there are distinctions, too, as when Jesus said of the end times, “about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mt 24:36). And if creation was accomplished ‘through’ the Son, does that not imply an initiating Power behind Him?
In making a common vase, someone has to shape the clay. That someone is not God, it’s you or me. So who is the creator of the vase? Do we really wish to mince words over this paradox? Theologians may, but do we?
Yet do we not see Jesus acting as Creator when He turns water into wine, or when He feeds five thousand on a few loaves and fish? Such wonders are not mere transformations but can only be understood as fresh acts of creation. And is not the same true of miracles of healing? When Jesus gives sight to the blind, He creates eyesight; when He restores a withered arm, He creates that arm anew. These are creative miracles.
Christianity is all about Jesus. Yet it’s easy to demote Jesus—ever so subtly—to second place in the Trinity, not fully God Himself but God’s representative, His mediator. To my mind, however, the term ‘mediator’ gives the wrong idea of Jesus, for as Christians we actually need no mediator between ourselves and God. Since Jesus is God, we go directly to Him. As Paul says, “A mediator implies more than one party; but God is one” (Gal 3:20).
In our Christian journey we experience not just one conversion but one after another. I consider the moment I called Jesus my Creator a conversion experience. Ever since then I find it exciting to think that there are people in history who have met their Creator face to face. Here and now, on this earth.
I’m reminded of the climax of the movie “Blade Runner,” one of the transcendent moments of film. After spending the whole story pursuing errant androids, the human tracker corners one of his quarry—or wait, is it the other way around? I won’t give away the plot, except to say that the power of this scene—and indeed of the whole film—lies in what happens when an android meets its maker.
Is this not the great iconic religious event: a human being meeting the Creator face to face? Well, folks, it has happened. It happened in Bethlehem, it happened at the Garden Tomb, it happened on the road to Damascus, and it has happened again to countless people throughout Christian history. It even happened to me (though that’s another story).
As Jesus Himself said, “Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).
Next Post: “Apprehending God” by A.W. Tozer
