My friend and worship minister asked several weeks ago that I write something about Jesus as a man for our advent celebration at church. I was happy to do this, glad to ponder what I have always thought to be a fairly elusive fact: Jesus was a man. That’s all that many people even today say he was. But when you read about him in the Bible– and if you actually truly believe– as I do– that He was the Incarnation of God Himself, it’s easy to see him only as God. Always solemn, always pontificating, doling out the beattitudes with all the enthusiasm of students on the approach to exam week. I don’t think I’m right in thinking this.
For years now I have imagined various episodes in the life of Christ for my children– the best and favorite of these only alluded to here, that of Peter’s effort to walk on water. But despite my imaginings, the writing here wasn’t at all easy, and even now I would say that I am not entirely satisfied with it. Still, the process set my mind at work on my Lord as the human being that He was, and I am grateful for that exercise. We’ll see what– if anything– eventually comes of it.
Until then, I thought I might just as well post this here. I read it aloud in last Sunday’s celebration. Maybe you, O Reader, will like it.
His contemporaries always only ever expected a man. He was a human being, after all, possessing a corporal frame with all of its needs and ungainliness. Even the shepherds, amazed into faith by the heavenly host, pressed in at the end of the evening to see a baby, a mere human thing, born in blood like the rest of us.
That they knew he was human fills the gospel’s pages. Herod thought he could kill him, and tried. His neighbors thought him ordinary; his family, that he was one of them. Even his closest friends mistook him for a human king, envisioning the overthrow of Rome and a dominion decidedly of this world. But he wouldn’t die or take his throne until it was time for it, until his heavenly Father said yes, and meanwhile the gospel’s writers mostly recorded for us his most un-human moments, those instances in which wisdom or miracle echoed something of what the angels sang.
They wrote to convince us that he was fully God. Believing, we read and find it there. We find it difficult to conceive that he was also fully man, and we must, for the most part, read between the lines to see it.
He was unattractive, perhaps even ugly. He did not have the composure or the bearing of a leader. He was itinerant. He was misunderstood. He was lonely. And He had something that is available to all of us: communion with His Father and the concomitant grief that this exquisite creation groans, that sin breeds sin, and that our sin runs deeper than we can imagine. He wept at the death of Lazarus. He sighed deeply at the healing of the man deaf and mute. He longed to enfold all of Jerusalem in his arms. He knew he would die to do so.
This unattractive man, this man of sorrow drew people to him: man, woman, child alike. Surely this was, in part, because he understood their pain. But they came, too, because he had something that is available to all of us: communion with His Father and its concomitant joy. And it’s this, I think, that we have to look for—that we must especially watch for in reading the gospels.
Don’t you hear the joy in his rebuke? “The kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these,” he said, all red in the face, because it was a tickle fest already: the children were pouncing on him, giggling, each of them anxious to hold his gaze. And it was with delight that he grasped Peter’s flailing hand and hauled him to the surface. He wrapped his own robe around Peter’s dripping head and rubbed it hard, playful, teasing. He laughed into his eyes as he said, “Where’s your faith, man?”
Of all mankind, his sorrow was the greatest. And of all mankind, his was the greatest joy—because he knew, beyond doubt, something that is true for us all: that the story—His story, our story, no matter how dark—all comes well in the end, and even better than we might imagine.
