So the Word became human and made his home among us. John 1:14 (NLT)
It's His Humanity – The First Hope – Part 1
With the Biblical text only covering a few years of Jesus life, and only SOME of the things that he experienced (and even then, the details differ from account to account), we know less about him than we think we do. We read about his miraculous birth, and his three to four years of “ministry.” We picture him turning water into wine, healing the blind beggar and the group of ten who had leprosy; raising Jairus’ daughter from the dead with a few words, and without even realizing it, healing a woman who touched his clothes in a crowd of persistent bleeding.
There are a good thirty years of Jesus life missing from the pages of the Bible.
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 three-ish 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.
Jesus.
He didn’t come as a king or a queen, as a ruler with absolute power, or a fierce army general ready to wage war on all who opposed him!
He took on flesh, and not as a full grown man, but an infant. Right into our origins. He bestowed upon humanity the honor of joining us, being one with us. Becoming one of us. Sacred. Holy. 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 just like us, in these things.
The beauty of Christ is seen first in his humanity.
Christmas isn’t just a time to celebrate a baby or give gifts or eat copious amounts of food. It’s a time to wonder at the miracle of the Incarnation of God. It’s a time to look deeply into this beautiful hope-filled moment and consider the humanity of Jesus, and wonder what else there is to him that we don’t yet know.
It’s a time to believe that the hope of salvation began the moment Jesus grew in his mother's womb.
Frederick Buechner said: “The incarnation is a kind of vast joke whereby the Creator of the ends of the earth comes among us in diapers… Until we too have taken the idea of the God-man seriously enough to be scandalized by it, we have not taken it as seriously as it demands to be taken.”
What are your thoughts on Jesus' humanity? Email them to talktous@pktfuel.com or leave a comment below.
More tomorrow…
Written by Lizzy Milani.
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It’s funny yesterday my partner & I were struck by the testing episode of Jesus’ life . No sooner than the Holy Spirit descends upon him after baptism he is transported into a desert of testing. Before the cross his human heart and mind were tested. Not only did God come to us in a stable, he experienced tests & temptation that we all face Jesus knows our humanity in all its forms.