"Ye are gods" John 10/Psalm 82 - Bradley Jersak

With LOADS of help from Bp. Chris E.W. Green and Fr. John Behr

“God glorifies himself in the human.” -Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Iona Sunset - Photo by Robert Nordling

First of many reflections from Iona

With LOADS of direct help from my friend and fellow pilgrim, Bp. Chris E.W. Green, and inspiration from conversations with Fr. John Behr and Abp. Rowan Williams.

Bp. Chris E.W. Green with Fr. John Behr - photo by Geordie Ziegler

Early Christian teachers (Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, et al) commonly cited Psalm 82:6 / John 10:34 (“You are gods”) in tandem with 2 Peter 1:4 (“that we may participate in the divine nature”) to develop the doctrine of theosis or deification or divinization—an idea also embedded in 2 Corinthians 3, where we read that the Holy Spirit is transforming (literally transfiguring) us from glory to glory into the image of Jesus Christ, who is the image of God. (See also Genesis 1:26, Deuteronomy 10:17, and Psalm 136:2).

It’s a powerful statement of human destiny, where God becomes human (the Incarnation) so that humanity might become divine— ‘gods’ in the sense that God’s children bear the image of their heavenly Father, by virtue of our union with Jesus Christ and his saving work.

Still, ‘you are gods’ is heady language—words I wouldn’t use but for Jesus’ use of the Psalm. Let’s take a moment to review.

John 10 – “You are gods”

In John 10, Jesus’ triggers his opponents with the statement, “I and the Father are one” (vs. 30). We pick up the story there:

³¹ The Jews [Judean religious establishment] took up stones again to stone him.
³² Jesus replied, “I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of these are you going to stone me?”

³³ The Jews answered, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, though only a human, are making yourself God.”

³⁴ Jesus answered, “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, you are gods’? ³⁵ If those to whom the word of God came were called ‘gods’—and the scripture cannot be annulled— ³⁶ can you say that the one whom the Father has sanctified and sent into the world is blaspheming because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’?

Here, Jesus is referring to Psalm 82, where the Psalmist has God say, “You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you.”

Jesus’ logic is quite simple: if God can call all those received his law ‘gods’ and ‘sons of the most High,’ why is it blasphemy for him to use those designations? Especially when the Father has sanctified and sent him into the world—observable through the good works they had witnessed (such as restoring sight to the blind man in John 9).

Chris points out that for Jesus, Scripture cannot be nullified or annulled. Rather, it stands as true specifically because of and in Jesus. Jesus is not here making himself God (as if he needed to). But he is being made Lord and Christ (to use Paul’s terms). And that means we are being made god, too.

They didn’t buy it. But at one time, I too struggled with Jesus’ argument because I thought he was pulling this phrase out of context. The reason for my hesitation was the way the Psalm 82 proceeds: “You are gods… but you will die like men.” It seemed an odd bit of proof texting to defend his title as ‘Son of God’ from such a condemning passage.

Psalm 82 – “You are gods, but you will die like men”

But this week, in conversation with Fr. John Behr, he got me rereading the Psalm itself through an Emmaus lens. I’ll revisit the key stanza, read Christologically:

According to Chris, the first question should be why Jesus’ use of the Psalm seemed ‘off’ to me. What assumptions underwrote my impression that Jesus’ exegesis was arbitrary or facetious? Some of these included:

• a certain way of reading the Bible,

• a particular way of knowing,

• assumptions about what it meant for God to be God,

• how I related being human to who God is, and

• assumptions about what death is.

This passage surfaces such assumptions and how they obscure what Jesus was up to. I was hearing no better than his opponents, sans the stones. Chris kindly cut through my gordian knot in the following movements:

‘God’ and ‘human’ are not mutually exclusive terms

Chris: We misconstrue Christ because we assumed and defined ‘god’ and ‘human’ as mutually exclusive terms. Yes, God IS unlike us … “God is not a human being, that he should lie, or a mortal, that he should change his mind” (Numbers 23:19) … until he IS! No, God is not a man, that he can die… until he DOES!

And then we discover that all things are as they are because Jesus is Christ and Lord. Thus, verse 6 is true of everyone because it is true of Jesus, and Jesus is the firstborn of creation, the One in whose image we are made.

We become human in the way Jesus is human, and we become gods by grace as Jesus is God by nature—just as by grace, he has taken our nature as his own. Jesus assumes our nature and we partake in his. He becomes, but we are made.

So, in Christ, what we mean by ‘gods’ is now inseparable from what we mean by being human beings.

Gods through death

Now, as I engaged Fr. John Behr (the Provocateur) on this text, what struck me was how the Psalm already hints at the ‘how.’ How does Jesus make us divine? By sharing all that he is with us, including and especially—surprise—his death! In “trampling down death by death,” Christ transforms our death (both in dying daily to egocentric self-will and “in the hour of our death”) into rebirth into the divine life.

To say we become ‘gods through death,’ like ‘strength in weakness,’ sounds counterintuitive… because, again, our assumptions about God, humanity, and death make Jesus’ reading seem problematic. But if we read Psalm 86 as prefigurement, fulfilled in Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, then “you are gods, NEVERTHELESS you will die like men” virtually becomes “BECAUSE you will die like men.”

As Behr says (especially in John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel), “In his passion, Christ becomes, as man, that which, as God, he always is.” That is, “the Word becomes flesh” in the fullest sense on the Cross.

To summarize, first the divine and human natures are not mutually opposed. Humanity shares in the divine nature by virtue of our creation in God’s image (where Jesus IS the Image of the image) and likeness—or more literally, likening, connoting a process in which the Spirit frees us to behold the One into whose Image we are becoming.

Second, divinization and death are likewise inseparable. As Steve Mitchinson puts it,“Jesus’ passion reframes life and death as dying and rebirth.” We are being drawn up into the likening process, where our life and death are transfigured into Jesus’ cruciform deification.

Okay, I’m spent. Next time, probably something about physis (nature) or third day seeds.