Being Human as Vocation
Becoming truly human is not just a matter of being, but of doing (hence the “becoming truly human”). In truth, being and doing are not separable, but are always one—our being is always a doing. Put otherwise, when the Spirit unites us to Christ we are not only given Christ’s identity (being), but Christ’s vocation (doing).1
Psalm 8:6–8, riffing on Genesis 1-2, describes the human vocation: “What is mankind that you are mindful of them, a son of man that you care for him? You made them a little lower than the angels; you crowned them with glory and honor and put everything under their feet.”
The author of Hebrews quotes Ps. 8 but riffs on it: “As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to them, but we do see Jesus…” (Heb. 2:8). Yes, we were created to have dominion over creation, but we do not yet have the dominion God means for us to have.
The human vocation is only fulfilled, for now, in Jesus—the pioneer of our faith. What is true of him, will be true of us. As Chris Green says, the human vocation is nothing less than a share in Jesus’ lordship, Jesus’ dominion over all creation.2 But we know that his “lordship” is not a “lording it over” creation, but rather a serving of creation.
Put another way, becoming truly human is a calling to become priests. Priestly work is mediating work. It is about reconciling two parties, it is about peacemaking, building bridges, and making connections.
But this is a calling for all humanity. It is a calling to a responsibility, a burden for others before God.
The Image of God: Relationality
Genesis 1 says that God created human beings in his image and after his likeness. But what is that image and likeness? The text is sparse and ambiguous. It leaves plenty of room for interpretation. Scripture invites us to fill in the spaces it leaves.
The most common answers that have been given to the question of what makes us in the image of God are either 1) faculties or 2) capacities we possess. Is it our faculty of reason and knowledge that makes us in the image of God? Is it our capacity to be virtuous and holy?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer argues that it is neither our won faculties or our capacities that make us image bearers. Rather, he suggests, is it is that we are created free.
“To say that in humankind God creates God’s own image on earth means that humankind is like the Creator in that it is free. To be sure, it is free only through God’s creation, through the word of God; it is free for the worship of the Creator. For in the language of the Bible freedom is not something that people have for themselves but something they have for others. No one is free ‘in herself’ or ‘in himself’--free as it were in a vacuum or free in the same way that a person may be musical, intelligent, or blind in herself or in himself. Freedom is not a quality a human being has; it is not an ability, a capacity, an attribute of being that may be deeply hidden in a person but can somehow be uncovered…”3
Bonhoeffer is saying the image of God in human beings is found in our freedom. But our freedom is not a faculty/capacity or a quality that we possess in and of ourselves. Our freedom is found in the face of our neighbor, not inside ourselves. Our freedom is not a freedom from our neighbors, but our freedom for them.
Freedom is not something you own. Freedom is a calling. It’s an event, a doing. It is a responsibility. Freedom can only arise in our relationship to the other.
“Being free means ‘being-free-for-the-other’, because I am bound to the other. Only by being in relation with the other am I free.”4
This is a very different definition of freedom than the one we typically conceive. Freedom for Bonhoeffer is something that happens between me and you, not something I possess all by myself. It happens to me through you. This is a definition of freedom rooted in our relationality rather than our individuality.
In other words, the image of God is fundamentally relational. Being the image of God is not something that I have all by myself without you. It is something we have only together—through our relationship to one another.
But where is he getting this from? Notice the text of Genesis 1 actually says.
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).
The image of God is found in our relationship to what is other than ourselves. He creates humanity male and female. This is unity in differentiation. Humans are different from one another, and in that difference they are one.
Bonhoeffer puts it like this:
“The creature is free in that one creature exists in relation to another creature, in that one human being is free for another human being. And God created them [male and female]. The human being is not alone. Human beings exist in duality, and it is in this dependence on the other that their creatureliness consists.”5
But how is this difference from one another what makes us in the image of God? Because God is not God alone. God is Trinity: Father, Son, and Spirit. In God there is relationality. God just is the relationships between the Three Persons. What makes God God is the relationships between Father, Son, and Spirit. He is one precisely in that he is three.
Humanity is made in the image of God in that we are constituted in relationship to one another. The image of God is in our inherent relationality.
What makes us human is that we are turned outward from ourselves to others. Our lives are created for the sake of others, not to be closed in on ourselves.
This is what makes the calling of becoming human a priestly calling. A priest’s work is about relationships.
Intercession: “Bone of my bone”
We can see that the human calling is a priestly calling most clearly in Genesis 2:15,“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work and to keep it.”
The phrase “work and keep” is carefully chosen. These words almost always appear in the Old Testament in reference to the job of the priests. Priests are to “work and keep” the temple (Numbers 3:7).
Genesis is picturing the Garden of Eden as a temple, as a Holy of Holies, with Adam and Eve as the High Priests of all creation. Eden is the temple for the sake of the world.
And this is precisely what priests do: they are not called to work in the temple instead of the world, but for the sake of the world. Or to put it another way: Adam and Eve are intercessors!
What does it mean to be an intercessor? Symeon the New Theologian says that an intercessor one who refuses to be saved apart from their neighbors. Paul in Romans 9 gives us an example: “I wish I were accursed and cut off for the sake of my kinsmen according to the flesh.” Paul wishes that he would not be saved at all if his kinsmen are not saved. Intercession is quintessentially priestly work.
Intercessors stand in for the sake of their neighbors and for the sake of the world.
Jesus, the great High Priest, is the true human not instead of all humanity, but for the sake of all humanity. He does what he does for the sake of the world! As Bonhoeffer never tires of saying, “Jesus is the man for others.”
And to be truly human in this way is to take up Jesus’ vocation. To live your life for the sake of your neighbor, for the sake of the world.
Think of Genesis again. In Genesis 2 God creates Eve from the side/rib of Adam and when Adam wakes up to see Eve, he has poetry on his lips: “This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.”
This isn’t a merely a romantic poem. He is saying, “I can’t be myself without you, Eve. Now you make me who I am! Before you were here I wasn’t even myself. You are bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!”
We all know this at a biological level. Who am I without my parents? Who am I without my children? Who am I without my friends? At a fundamental level these people make me who I am.
But while biology and natural friendship shows us something of the truth of what it means to be human, Jesus calls us to something higher. He says, “Even the tax collectors love those who love them back. I’m calling you to love your enemies.”
In calling us to love our enemies Jesus is calling us to a deeper intercession, a deeper humanity. When Paul says that he wishes he would be accursed and cut off for the sake of his kinsmen, he is speaking not only of his friends but even his enemies. Many of his kinsmen wanted to kill him, and yet he is saying: “I am not myself without them. I refuse to be saved without them. God, if you are going to have me, you have to take these people, too!”
That’s the work of an intercessor: to look at your neighbors, including your enemies, and say: “This is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!”
When Jesus was hanging on the cross he looked at the soldiers who were crucifying him and cried, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do!”
This is the deep intercession we are called to. Jesus looks into the faces of his greatest enemies and all that he can think is: “These people are bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. I cannot be who I am without them!”
This is the deep truth of the gospel: Jesus cannot be himself without you or me. But he also cannot be himself without our greatest enemies. This is the calling to priestly intercession.
When you and I gather to worship each Sunday morning, we are called to bring the bones of others with us. When we eat of the bread and drink from the cup, we carry the bones of our neighbors with us. We bring the bones of those who cannot be there with us and even those who, for the time being, refuse to be there with us. We worship for the sake of the world.
Why? Because we are called to be priests. This is what it means to be human.
The call to be human is a call to recognize that your neighbors (including your enemies) are “bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh.” We are called to carry the bones of the world before God for the sake of the world.
Chris Green sums it up perfectly:
“The church exists only to remind the world of its true nature and its true destiny in the kingdom of God… For now, however, we find ourselves called out from [the world], but only because we have been singled out by God to share in the work of making room for [the world]. We take on the ecclesial vocation always only on behalf of others—never instead of them, much less against them. We are the called out ones whose lives are dedicated entirely to collaboration with God’s work for those who have yet to hear or to submit to the call. The elect are elected always for the sake of the non-elect. The church is a remnant of the world, gathered from the world to be both a temple and a kingdom of priests for the world’s sake.”6
Chris E.W. Green, Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 35.
Green, Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 11—12.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, (DBW Vol. 3), pp. 62—63.
Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, (DBW Vol. 3), p. 63.
Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, (DBW Vol. 3), p. 64.
Green, Sanctifying Interpretation, pp. 21,
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