Jesus.
Man. God.
Fully human and fully God.
We worship, follow, serve, and with our limited understanding of trinity try to grasp how man and God can co exist in one person.
The result is that often we see Jesus the man as special, as other, as ‘but that was Jesus’. But I think this means we also loose the wonder of the incarnation. Jesus was “Pleased, as man, with man to dwell.” Immanuel, God with us, God became one of us. Recently in church we sang the line “What a glorious way, that you have saved me…” Yes, the glory is in the resurrection, but it is also in the whole incarnation and life of Jesus. Jesus was willing to live the nitty gritty, to get dirty, tired, to hurt, to cry, to be hungry, to need help. He was willing to be a vulnerable baby, totally dependant on two other people, only able to communicate through crying, and fleeing the country, living in Egypt as a refugee.
Jesus was human. He had human restrictions. He had to learn how to walk, how to talk. He had to be potty trained as a child, or whatever the first century equivalent was. Jesus didn’t sin, but he made mistakes. He must have done because that is part of growing, learning and being human. The first time he tried to walk, he fell over. When he started to run he fell again and skinned his knees. I’ve no doubt when he first used Joseph’s tools, he cut himself. He ate, he drank, he enjoyed a party. Being fully human, if he did those things then he also went to the toilet. The Bible says that Jesus wept, but I’ll tell you something else, Jesus farted…and it smelled.
Jesus was human.
Jesus was also the perfect image of God. He said that those who had seen him, have seen the Father. (Jn14:7) Jesus was God and man, but he didn’t grasp at his divinity, he didn’t lord it over people. (Phil 2) He held both his divinity and his humanity in a light hold, being comfortable with who he was. This, maybe is where humility comes. Jesus was humble because he accepted who he was and was content with his own acceptance of that. He had no need to throw himself off a cliff and have angels swoop to his rescue, to reassure him. He had no need to have the cities of world laid at his feet for him to rule. He had no need of a warrior horse to mount, the donkey was enough as he knew he was the Prince of Peace. Jesus was content to walk and talk with women, children, outcasts, because he had nothing to prove to anyone, even himself.
Jesus was God, so he knew everything.
Jesus was human, so his knowledge was limited.
There are so many questions in this enigma. Reason says “how?” Faith says “how wonderful.”
I have no idea how God can be three and one. I have no idea how God can give up being God, be fully man and at the same time God can still be. Logic runs away holding an exploded head.
The glory of the incarnation is not just what was to come…the glory was in what was happening right then, when God was born as a fragile human baby. When the “hopes and fears of all the years” were joined together at the manger and God became man.