So the Word became human and made his home among us. John 1:14 (NLT)
Humanity and Divinity – Normal Series – Part 6
Go to PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5
It’s hard to picture Jesus as a normal guy. We think of him as being, and know him to be, a SUPERNATURAL man; God incarnate, the divine housed in flesh: everything BUT normal.
How can we relate to him? Us mere mortals, normal humans, with no special powers; we cannot heal or cast out, or raise the dead… much less raise ourselves out of our own death. Yet we call him friend, saviour, brother… personal and close and understanding.
With the Bible only covering a few years of Jesus life, we tend only to see him in the light of those limited time frames. We read about his miraculous birth, and his three to four years of “ministry.” The moment that he turned water into wine is well documented, as is the healing of the man who was a blind beggar and the ten people who had leprosy. We can read about how he raised Jairus' daughter from the dead and without even realising it, dried up the persistent bleeding of a woman who touched his cloak in a crowd.
Normal?
There are a good thirty years of Jesus life missing from the pages of the Bible. Thirty years. Thirty. The ones after his birth and preceding his baptism. Do you ever think about those years?
What happened there?
Jesus was being a normal guy. Well, a normal First-Century Jewish Rabbi kind-of-guy.
It’s not Jesus godliness that makes him so wondrous – it's his humanity. We usually look to the cross as God’s first significant demonstration of his love for us. But if we look back just another thirty odd years or so before the crucifixion of Christ, we see another incredible act and declaration of God's love:
The incarnation.
God became a human.
BAM! That's it, right there! God showed his eternal love and devotion for us by incarnating himself into normal humanity. Jesus. He didn’t come as a king or a queen, or a ruler with absolute power, or a fierce army general ready to wage war on all who opposed him! He didn't walk down from heaven and onto the earth as an obvious god and ruler.
He took on flesh. He bestowed upon humanity the honour of joining us, being one with us. Becoming one of us. Sacred. Holy. Normal. Human.
We cannot understand Christ’s divinity unless we first understand his humanity. We cannot understand his supernatural essence if we can’t see his normality and everyday ordinariness.
Those thirty years that we know nothing about in the life of Jesus would have been filled with all the things that our “nothing years” are filled with. Waiting, learning, working, eating, living, laughing, crying, growing, dreaming, the discovery of purpose and desire and discipline. Do you think he knew by age five that he was the Saviour? Destined to die on a cross? And rise again? I think Jesus discovered his destiny the same way we all do… heart and soul passions, prayer, connection, a belly full of fire… he was normal, just like us, in these things.
He would have walked the streets of his town, listened to his elders, conversed about politics and religion. He would have seen things that made him angry, and other things that would have filled him with joy. Purpose would have welled up within him, as it does in all of us, compelling him forward, directing his steps and disciplines.
The beauty of Christ is first seen in his humanity.
Jesus is humanity and divinity all at the same time. You cannot pull them apart from each other and call him one or the other. And just like us, you cannot see the beauty of God incarnate in flesh until you understand how completely normal Jesus was. Human. But entwined into his humanity was divinity; threaded through and around each other.
And the interesting thing about that is; in our own normal, human state – you and I – we are invited by Christ, to share in this mix of holy humanity… the divine and the natural all rolled into one.
That is his normal, everyday invitation to us all.
Go to Part 7 – Your Life – The Everyday Normal One »
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