The Humble Mediator

For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. 1 TIMOTHY 2:5

Augustine’s road to Christ ran through the Platonists, and it is one of the most instructive things about him that he tells us exactly what they gave him and exactly what they could not. In Book VII of the Confessions he describes reading certain books of the Platonist philosophers in Latin translation. They set him free from the Manichaean habit of imagining God as a kind of physical stuff spread through space. They taught him to look inward and upward, to a God who is spirit and unchangeable light. He found in them, he says, much that was like the opening of John’s Gospel. But one thing he did not find.

What the philosophers lacked

He sets it out in a careful list. He read there, in substance, that in the beginning was the Word, and that the Word was God, and that all things were made by Him. “But that the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, I read not there.” He read that the Son was in the form of God. He did not read that He emptied Himself, took the form of a servant, humbled Himself and became obedient unto death.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth. JOHN 1:14

The philosophers could see the goal. They could not supply the road. Augustine has a memorable image for this. It is one thing, he says, to see the land of peace from a wooded mountain-top and find no way to it; it is another to keep to the road that leads there. The Platonists stood on the mountain and looked. They knew there was a homeland; they did not know how to reach it, and they were too proud to take the road God had made, because the road was a crucified man.

I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. JOHN 14:6

Pride and its cure

For Augustine the root of all sin was pride — the creature’s refusal to be a creature, the wish to be one’s own god. And pride is precisely what keeps the clever from coming to Christ. The Platonists, he says, scorned to learn of Him who is meek and lowly in heart. Augustine himself had once despised the Scriptures because their style was so plain beside Cicero’s. He had wanted a religion that flattered his mind. God gave him one that humbled it.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. MATTHEW 11:29

The confession he makes about this period is one of the most searching in the book. He had begun to understand God, but he did not yet cling to Christ, because he did not yet want to be humble. “For I did not hold to my Lord Jesus Christ, I, humbled, to the Humble,” he writes, “nor knew I yet whereto His infirmity would guide us.” Only a humbled man can take hold of a humble Saviour. The way to God is not up, by the strength of our minds, but down, by the humility of His Son.

In the same book he describes a moment when, lifted briefly towards God, he found himself far off, in what he calls the region of unlikeness, and seemed to hear a voice from on high: “I am the food of grown men, grow, and thou shalt feed upon Me; nor shalt thou convert Me, like the food of thy flesh into thee, but thou shalt be converted into Me.” But how could a creature so unlike God feed upon Him? Only if God made Himself food fit for us. That, Augustine says, is why the Word was made flesh: so that the Wisdom by which all things were made might become milk for our infancy.

Why the Mediator must be God and man

Augustine returned to Christ the Mediator throughout the Enchiridion, and he is exact. A mediator stands between two parties and reconciles them. Adam, before he sinned, needed no mediator. But when sin had opened a great gulf between God and the human race, it was fitting that One who alone of all humanity was born, lived and died without sin should reconcile us to God. And He could not do it unless He were both. We could not be redeemed, Augustine insists, even through the one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, if He were not also God.

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men. PHILIPPIANS 2:5–7

Then he gives the reason in a phrase that sums up his whole understanding of salvation. God became man, he says, “in order that the pride of man might be exposed and cured through the humility of God.” Our disease was pride. The medicine was a God who stooped. There is no more striking remedy in all of theology: the infinite God healing the arrogance of creatures by becoming lowlier than any of them.

Victor because Victim

At the end of Book X of the Confessions, after the long and painful inventory of his continuing temptations, Augustine turns again to Christ, and he writes of Him in one of his most concentrated sentences. Christ was, he says, “for us to Thee both Victor and Victim, and therefore Victor, because the Victim.” He won by losing, conquered by dying, prevailed by being sacrificed. And Augustine draws the conclusion for his own weary soul: his hope is strong in Him, because otherwise he would despair.

Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them. HEBREWS 7:25

It is worth pausing here, because this is the Augustine who is often forgotten. He is remembered as the great theologian of sin and grace, and he was. But sin and grace are not abstract categories in him. Grace has a face. It is the face of a Man who took the lowest place, and Augustine never tired of looking at it. When he was most conscious of his own continuing weakness, it was not to his conversion or his office or his learning that he turned. It was to Christ, the Mediator, who had paid the price and was standing for him still.

God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble. 1 PETER 5:5

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask yourself honestly whether there is any part of the gospel you find beneath you — its plainness, its people, its demands. Confess that pride to God.

2. Read Philippians 2:5–11 slowly each day this week, and choose one concrete act of humility in your household or work.

3. When you are most aware of your failures, deliberately turn your eyes from yourself to Christ the Mediator, as Augustine did at the end of Book X.

4. If you are drawn to spiritual ideas but reluctant to commit yourself to Christ, ask what it would mean for you to take the road rather than admire the view.

5. Thank God specifically that the Son became what you are so that you could be brought to Him.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You were in the form of God, and You took the form of a servant for me.

I confess the pride that has kept me from You, and the pride that still wants to reach God by my own strength.

Humble me, that I may hold on to You, the Humble One. Be my way, for I cannot find the road home alone.

You are Victor because You were Victim. Let my hope rest wholly in You. Amen.