I love Twitter. When I first heard about it I confess I was conflicted. The social commentator in me was appalled. My inner Neil Postman took the curmudgeon approach, bemoaning the dumbing down of our discourse to 140 characters. Has our attention span really dropped this far? The poet and the economist inside me, however, formed a strange alliance in embracing Twitter, the economist loving the streamlined nature, the poet adoring the challenge of cramming as much wonder, as many surprising moments of epiphany wrapped in beauty into 140 characters as possible.
As a theologian my job is to make distinctions, often ones so subtle they are hard to see. Precision and nuance are the tools of that trade. On Twitter all of these hats I wear often clash. The use of the most potent poetic image may mean, from time to time, that qualifiers are left off. On the other hand, using the qualifiers not only clouds the beauty of the image, but puts you over the character count.
Consider this glorious truth- Jesus changes everything. I admit that with the exception of Jesus, the words themselves are not startling. They’re pedestrian even. But the thought is supposed to be shocking. Everything? All of us face the temptation to divide our lives into the sacred and the secular, the holy and the mundane. Jesus is given charge over our prayers, our eternities, our deepest selves. But isn’t a peanut butter sandwich just a peanut butter sandwich? Isn’t such the same for the most devout believer and the most wretched and lost soul? No, it’s not.
The peanut butter sandwich is to the believer not just bread and peanut butter, but the answer to our prayer that He would give us this day our daily bread. It is a fulfillment of the dominion mandate, to rule over the creation. It is a foretaste of heaven, manna from on high. It is an occasion for worship, a gift, like all gifts through which we behold the glory of the Giver. Jesus changes everything.
Except, of course, that He doesn’t. It’s just not strictly true that Jesus changes everything. What is missed in such pithy shorthand is another sublime reality- that the God of heaven and earth, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, has never changed, will never change. Insofar as the Godhead is a thing (and more theological nuance could argue that while real, the Godhead is not, strictly speaking, a thing) it is one thing that stays the same.
Contra Einstein, time is not that fixed point by which all else is relativized, an ontological North Star, but God is. There is no shadow of turning in Him. He is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. The Westminster Shorter Catechism describes the living God to us as a spirit, infinite, and eternal before adding this fourth attribute- unchangeable.
I, along with the whole of the created order, depend upon Jesus, the Alpha and the Omega. He is about the business of bringing all things under subjection- in less poetic language, changing everything, from Twitter to peanut butter sandwiches. But, to His everlasting glory He does not and will not change. Consider this piece then a footnote, the fine print. Jesus changes everything. Except Jesus.