Chinatown

I guess what you eventually have to come to terms with is the fact that Jesus believed in God, a very specific God as a matter of fact, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God he called Father.  Scripture offers very little evidence that Jesus thought he was that God.  In fact, the synoptic Gospels don't ever seem to deal with that question.  But John starts his Gospel with the bold statement that, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us," and "the Word was with God and the Word was God."
This is where things get difficult and confusing, this is where the theologians start to get a reputation for endless and intractable arguing that seems to do nothing and go nowhere, this is the Chinatown of faith.
In the movie Chinatown, Jack Nicholson plays a private detective who used to work for the LAPD.  When he was with the police, one of his beats was the Asian immigrant section of the city.  In that era, as I suppose it still is to some extent, the immigrant community was insular and downright mystifying to westerners.  Crimes took on such a different character that the detectives that worked the Chinatown beat had a way of brushing off things that just didn't make sense or that challenged their assumptions a little too much: "It's Chinatown."  That's all you needed to say when things got a little too convoluted, it was an explanation without actually explaining.
The "Chinatown" of Christian faith is this thing called the Trinity, or the Triune nature of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit (or if you prefer: Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer).  Internally we have the Nicene Creed and some really wonderful explanations of how and why we believe, including the poetic explanation of John Donne: "Bones to reason but milk to faith."  Trinitarian faith allows us to be internally consistent, and affirm quite a few things about the nature of the relationship between God the Creator and Jesus of Nazareth.  These affirmations are crucial to Christian understanding of our own relationship with God.
When we read, study and say the Nicene Creed, we are getting in touch with an historical debate of enormous scope and importance, but it's a debate that to critics on the outside often looks like a bunch of political squabbles between bishops about who is going to run the show.  There are all sorts of conspiracy theories and various forms of religio-historic quackery that surround the fourth century debates that defined and continue to define Christian orthodoxy.
The Trinity, and springing from that the equally head spinning debate over the human/divine nature of Jesus.  Another scene from Chinatown, (spoiler alert, although is that really necessary for a movie that has been around so long?) the character played by Faye Dunaway has been at the center of a lot of the action, as well as being romantically involved with Nicholson's character, and things have come to a head.  He's grilling her about the identity of the young girl who is also mixed up in the whole thing: "Is she your sister or your daughter?"  Dunaway's character has been sexually abused by her father and so the answer is that both things are true, she is both sister and daughter, but that answer doesn't make sense, it's just a little too strange to be true, it's Chinatown all over again.
Jesus is both human and divine, and it's rather important that we don't do violence to one identity in the name of the other.  Paul Tillich described this as walking a narrow ridge between two chasms, holding in tension the full reality of both identities.
The problem is, in an age of relativist thinking, the two chasms don't seem so very foreboding, they sort of seem like nice little lakes where people are playing and having fun, while orthodoxy is uncomfortably balancing in that awful tension.  On the one side you have the divine camp, where Jesus is just "God in a man suit."  This was and is the hallmark perspective of Gnostics of many varieties.  It just makes no sense that God would or could actually become a genuine human being, so the whole Jesus thing must have been like God just checking us out see what we would do.  On this side you get lots of people who masquerade as Christians, and they will passionately defend their belief in a persistently all powerful, omnipotent God, who could never ever really limit himself so much that he would actually die on a cross.  The only thing to do with this sort of god is to hold on and try not tick him off too much, because eventually humanity is just going to push him too far and boom: apocalypse... you know, because god only has so much patience. On the other side you have all those folks who like the purely human Jesus well enough, but because he's just a guy, we really don't need to actually do anything about our admiration of him, you know, why worship?  Why live out a cruciform existence? Why mess around with all that tension and balancing? Why not just leave Chinatown altogether? It's never going to make sense and it's just going to bum you out.
Maybe this debate really only matters to the ones who choose to live on that ridge and hold those lines, but if it matters then in matters a whole awful lot.
As I stated Monday, on my good days I could follow a Jeffersonian Jesus, no problems.  The days when I need the Jesus of Athanasius, Anselm and Augustine, are the days when the cross looms large, as it does on this Wednesday.  We're getting closer to the betrayal and the denial and the brutality.  The days when suffering dominates the landscape and blackens the sky are the days when I need a Jesus who is both a man in full and fully God.  Funny thing is, on those days, in my experience, I don't need an explanation, I need a presence.  When the only answer is "It's Chinatown," that's when I really need Jesus, fully human and fully divine.