The Ultimate Thin Place – The Person of Jesus Christ.

The Ultimate Thin Place – The Lord Jesus Christ.

“The thin place is where the veil between this world and the next is so sheer that it is easy to step through.” (Barbara Brown Taylor, Home By Another Way).

This term from an ancient Celtic tradition has stood the test of time. The idea of a thin place between heaven and earth has captured our imaginations, and yet is not just a metaphor.  Thin places are literal as well.

The traditional thin place as the Irish understood it has been described in many ways:  where the veil between heaven and earth is so thin as to be porous, permeable, practically transparent; where the space between the divine and the human has narrowed; where the boundary between heaven and earth has collapsed; where the wall between heaven and earth have become indistinguishable; where the doors between heaven and earth have cracked open enough to walk through, if only temporarily; the place where eternity and time seem to join together.

Those descriptions of thin places have recently been expanded to include… wherever God has chosen to reveal Himself and make Himself known with unusual intimacy; wherever the sacred interaction with God’s presence is more pronounced and accessible; wherever the Holy Spirit is released in a particularly powerful way; a physical space where one can more directly and intensely experience God’s presence. I like to think of a thin place as when the Spirit of God opens the skylight of the earth’s roof and helps us climb through it into the cellar of heaven.

The Thin Man. Let’s just say right at the start that the ultimate Thin Place is actually a Person, Jesus Christ, in which the boundaries between heaven and earth were removed in His Incarnation. Jesus was the definitive Thin Place in the flesh, in which the veil between the divine and the human were blended into One. Yes, in the eternal union between the Father and the Son, Jesus is our walking, talking Thin Place, the veil of separation between heaven and earth eternally torn in two, the wall between God and mankind erased for good. Yeshua Messiah, the Lord and Anointed One, lives eternally as the one and only Thin Man.

God with Skin. When the timeless God decided to put skin on Himself and become subject to time and creation, He didn’t merely sneak through a little crack in the door between heaven and earth. God didn’t search the world over for that one special thin place where he could step from heaven to earth. Instead, God unlocked a revolving door between heaven and earth that has never stopped. The Incarnation brought with it a barrage of people and angels from the other side of reality, it welcomed onto earth those moments and events that served to combine heaven and earth. With Jesus, the earth didn’t seem to have boundaries keeping heaven out.

1. Angels. These heavenly beings could appear at any time when Jesus was around, whether at His birth in Bethlehem, His sorrow at Gethsemane, or His exhaustion in the wilderness. There was a heavenly angelic presence that accompanied Jesus at His Resurrection and at His Ascension. This open-door policy also included beings from the spiritual realm of fallen angels in the form of demons, and even a personal visit from the Evil One at Christ’s temptation. All around Jesus, the angelic beings from heaven didn’t even see a thin place, they didn’t see any separation at all. They saw a welcome mat and an open gate to earth.
2. Mother Mary. Here we find the very definition of a thin place as well… the Holy Spirit came from heaven to earth to overshadow her and conceive the God-Man in her womb! There was absolutely no barrier between the heavenly and the earthly. Heavenly angels visited Mary as well through the earthy process of announcing the presence of God within her. And her womb was indeed a unique thin place, bearing within her earthly body the heavenly Christ. (refer to Luke 1).
3. Baptism and the Transfiguration. At His baptism in the Jordan River, the sky opened up, actually it tore apart violently, it was more ripped open, and the Father’s voice was heard booming through the sky into everyone’s hearing. The Spirit of God flew right through that thin place in the sky’s fabric and landed with a special Father’s blessing upon the Son. And at the Transfiguration on Mt. Tabor, once gain we observe an amazing thin place, with a heavenly cloud of the Father descending to earth with an unearthly light show. Once again, as at the Baptism, we hear the Father’s voice of blessing. But in this thin place, we see the long-departed Elijah and Moses climbing through the veil and having a conversation with Jesus about His “exodus” soon to come. The Jordan River and Mt. Tabor, two monumental thin places with Jesus right in the middle of all that action that combined heaven and earth. (refer to Matthew 3 and 17, and corollary passages in the gospels).
4. The Veil. In so many ways, the veil separating the Holy of Holies from the outside world was an excellent symbol of the boundary between heaven and earth, the curtain established by God to separate God’s dwelling place and humanity’s dwelling place. This Holiest Place was inaccessible except for that one Day of Atonement, and that curtain of separation could not be violated in any way. The only time the veil was considered a thin place was that one Day, and other than that, the boundary would be firm and impassable. So how significant was it that when Jesus died, the Temple veil separating the heavenly from the earthly was torn from top to bottom. The only One capable of tearing this veil was God Himself, and there is no doubt that the Spirit of God paid a visit, and took what was intended to be permanent and untearable, and starting at the top, forcefully ripping it down to the very bottom. Could it be that God wants the whole earth to be a thin place, with no veil separating what is above from what is below? (refer to Matthew 27:51).
5. The Ascension. The Thin Man literally and physically joined earth to heaven when in His risen body He returned to His home at the Father’s side. Jesus erased all boundaries in the cosmos by claiming each realm as His own while returning to God. And there He remains for now, the risen earthly body of Christ in the place of honor at the right hand of the heavenly Father. “The Ascension completed the union of God and humanity, for a Man who is God now reigns in heaven.” (Orthodox Liturgy). (refer to Mark 16, Luke 24, and Acts 1).

Scripture leaves no doubts about the thinness of Christ, about His Incarnation erasing any boundaries between heaven and earth and joining these two realms together in perfect and eternal unity. Jesus was the only person to be qualified as the mediator between God and man (1 Tim. 2:5); He emptied Himself of heavenly privileges and took on human likeness, in the very nature of a servant (Phil. 2); He comes from above, is above all, and yet belongs to the earth (John 3:31); He has been given all authority in heaven and on earth despite His human flesh (Matt. 28:18); He is the Son who is the radiance of God’s glory, the exact duplicate  representation of God’s Being (Heb. 1:3); He contains all the fullness of the Deity in human form (Col. 2:9); He lived on earth and yet was present with God before the creation of the world (John 17).

The convergence of God and man in the Person of Christ is beautifully, powerfully described in Colossians 1:15-20:

“Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.

He existed before anything was created

and is supreme over all creation.

For through Him God created everything

in the heavenly realms and on earth.

He made the things we can see and the things we can’t see –

such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers and authorities in the unseen world.

Everything was created through Him and for Him.

He existed before anything else, and He holds all creation together.

Christ is also the head of the church, which is His body.

He is the beginning, supreme over all who rise from the dead.

So He is first in everything.

For God in all His fullness was pleased to live in Christ,

and through Him God reconciled everything to Himself.

He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth

by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.” (NLT).

On a rich person’s birthday, the usual question is, what do you get the person who has everything? Something similar can be said about this ancient church hymn… What can you say about a song that says everything? This hymn is so rich, so deep, so glorious in its exaltation of Christ, that there is not much more that can be said about it.

The Colossian church was an embattled church, riddled with false teachers who claimed that Jesus could not be both divine and human, He could not be a spiritual Lord as well as a human being. Paul sets the record straight with this ancient hymn that says it all. Paul emphatically claims that, yes, Jesus is enough. He is God in the flesh, He contains the fullness of God. Christ is sufficient, not just in Colossae but in all of creation.

The song refers to the preexistence of Christ, the creation of the cosmos, and the new creation in full redemption. Christ is the visible image, the icon, of the eternal God in heaven. It’s not just a passing resemblance. Jesus is of the same substance as God. Jesus has a prototype from which He was drawn, the Lord God. Jesus and God are both eternally real, both are reflections of the Other, and are not merely a noble intellectual thought or an especially imaginative idea. Indeed, the fullness of God has a home in Christ.

Christ was not a created being. He is a Co-Creator, preeminent among all the created order. Christ is the cause of creation, and without Him creation would not exist. Christ is the “first-born” of all creation in the sense that He is the beginning of all creation, the first principle of creation. All of creation is held together and functions through Christ. Without Christ, creation would have no integrity, the pieces wouldn’t fit or function.

Because of the resurrection, Christ is head of His body, the church. Christ guides and directs His body on earth, just as the head does so in a human body. His church body is His presence in the world. Since believers take on God’s nature, His body will do what He did, go where He went, see people the way He saw people, think the way He thought. The church has His spiritual DNA and represents Him on earth. Christ the Divine Head will orchestrate all the members of His body, with all their unique gifts and functions.

In the new creation, all things will be reconciled through Christ, renewed and redeemed. All things will be brought back to Himself, putting together what belonged together, restored to its original intent. There will be peace and unity because of Christ’s blood on the cross. His blood restores all of creation. Christ is the Lord of the new creation just as He is the Lord of the original creation.

A Child is Born (Official Music Video) | Celtic Worship (youtube.com)