Last week I discussed the way we have taken the issue of who Jesus is and made it a very subjective, personal experience. Too often we look at Jesus uncritically and without any real theological purpose. Jesus invites us to come know him. He wants us to continually dig deeper into his nature and character. Jesus wants us to know him because only through him can we know the Father (Matthew 11:27).
So having established that we can truly know Jesus and that it is important to do so, this week we begin to dive into a very important aspect of Jesus; his humanity. We are starting with his humanity because it is through this that we are able to come to know God more fully.
The Humanity of Christ
Perhaps the most radical claim Christians make is that God, the mighty creator of the world, willingly gave up the privileges of heaven to become a mortal man. We claim that the holy and perfect Judge chose to live in a world of sin. We claim that the source of eternal life experienced death. We claim that the Sovereign of the entire cosmos was confined to a measly human body.
Think about how crazy that sounds. There are two things about Christianity that the other monotheistic religions on the planet find abhorrent. The first is the Trinity (something we will most certainly discuss at length), and the second is this very idea; that God became man. In fact there are many Christians who find this preposterous!
Think about it. How much time do we spend in our churches defending the fact that Jesus is God? Quite a bit. How much time do we spend emphasizing how different he is from us? Enough to where a majority of young people coming out of our churches don't even believe he is human. We do everything short of openly denying the Incarnation (the humanity of Jesus).
What should be a cause for celebration and many "HALLELUJAHS!" has become something we are too scared to admit; that Jesus really is fully human.
Jesus, while on earth, was hungry like us. He was thirsty like us. He ached and hurt like us. He got tired like us. He needed alone time like us. He had best friends like us. He got dirty like us. He was tempted to sin like us. He got scared just like us.
Jesus had a family who didn't really agree with what he was doing. Jesus paid taxes. Before he started teaching, Jesus had a job in construction. Jesus celebrated holidays, attended worship services, and went to weddings. Jesus even died.
We have trouble envisioning Jesus doing the mundane, ordinary task of living. I think we read about Jesus and he is walking around with a halo of light around him. Truth is the Bible says that he is plain looking and that he wouldn't stick out in a crowd (Isaiah 53:2). He was entrenched in a culture and a religion in a specific time and a specific place, but I think we like to read as if he were a 21st century American.
What is even more mind boggling is that BECAUSE of his humanity we can come to know God more fully than ever before.
God has always been revealing himself to humanity. The primary mode for this has been Scripture, but Scripture tells us that this is not necessarily how it should be. When God creates the world, who is revealed to be made in his image? Humanity. (Genesis 1:27) We are supposed to be the ones that most fully reflect and show the world who God is. We are called to be images (or reflections) of God.
Then what is the point of Scripture? Well if we had not rebelled against God and allowed sin to corrupt us, there would be no reason for Scripture. The Bible is here to reveal God to humanity so that we may be transformed back into true images of God. In our corrupted, sinful states we can't know God or properly bear his image. Scripture is God calling his people out of sin and back to him.
Look at this verse in Colossians 1:15. "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation." For the longest time I didn't really understand this verse (or the whole passage that follows). Maybe I still don't, but I think that Paul didn't call Jesus the "image of the invisible God" by mistake.
Jesus is the true image of God not because of his divine nature, but because he is human uncorrupted by sin. Jesus is what Adam was supposed to be; the image of God. It is through his life and death that we truly see who God is.
Conclusion
I hope this entry has challenged you in some way to meditate on the person of Jesus. I pray that we as a body begin affirming the humanity of Jesus and its importance. Clearly I could keep going (in fact I could probably write a book on the subject) but the purpose of this blog is to help kick off discussion. I would like to close with one final point; the real reason I think we ignore the humanity of Christ.
We have long ignored the fact that Jesus is truly human because of what it means for us. If Jesus, a man who lived a sinless life, is 100% human like me then I have no excuse. We like to differentiate Jesus from ourselves because it gets us out of living the wholly devoted life that he modeled. If he is different, then there is no pressure to actually live like he does. But if Jesus is actually a human being, then we have no excuse.
Comments
Post a Comment