On Accepting Jesus’ Humanity and Ours
January 1, 2023
We had a busy time in our household these past couple of weeks with family visiting, plans made then discarded then re-jigged as we watched weather forecasts and pleaded with young nieces not to drive in awful conditions, re-adjusted dinner and other plans, and then a few days before Christmas I decided to buy a first pair of ice skates in twenty years and proceeded to break my wrist on my first public outing with said skates.
In some ways very normal human family stuff: the delights of sharing time with loved ones, hard work of cleaning and preparation, the fun of company and laughter, and experiences of human fragility – not just the broken wrist, but the relationships that aren’t perfect, the wounds and griefs in family life that haven’t yet healed. It’s been a flurry of activity in which I’ve barely had a chance to sit and breathe.
And when I had the opportunity to make quiet and to reflect on these readings for today it feels to me like God – through the organizers of the Revised Common Lectionary and our liturgical cycles – has given us just that: some breathing space to reflect on being human. Perhaps like the breathing space given to Mary after the flurry of getting to Bethlehem, giving birth in suboptimal conditions, and then being visited by strangers who knew things about her and her child that were magnificent and overwhelming to hear. Mary pondered these mysteries in her heart. Who is this child in my arms? What is God doing with us and in us in this place?
The psalmist today is also in pondering mode: With all that you have done, O God, with all that you have created in this world of wonders and beauty, what are we mere mortals that you even pay any attention to us? But, Ah, you have made us just a little lower than God, crowning us with honour, and trusting us with responsibility for all that you have made! Is this not too much to ponder, too big for us to get our minds around? And yet, you have made our minds restless for you, minds wandering trying to find our true home, minds unfulfilled until they connect deeply with our hearts and bodies and whole being and we find our whole selves in You.
When my sons were the ages that some kids are when they first get into superheroes (whether the Marvel universe of superheroes or the DC universe of superheroes – I mix them up all the time) I remember having one of the biggest theological challenges of my life trying to help them to distinguish between Jesus, with all the miracles and wonders they knew from the Gospel stories about him, and the super-humans in their comic books.
I wonder if many of us don’t have the same challenge. In our human fragility and limitation, we’ve been trained to look for superheroes who can exemplify the best of what we aspire to and can surpass our capabilities, someone relatable and just like us in so many ways, but far above us, but we could never be like them… and perhaps in that distance some comfort is born, because superheroes don’t really ask anything of us and we can go on with our lives as we normally do, knowing that we can call on Batman or Superman or Wonder Woman (I’m dating myself here, and know that the Marvel and DC Universes contain a veritable Pantheon of gods). Superheroes are for the most part self contained, and heroic because they do it all themselves.
I think you know where I’m going here, that Jesus is different. Mary had to ponder that perhaps not long after giving birth. She was not likely to need convincing that the child she’d just given birth to is fully human. For her, the pondering must have been about what God through these angels – starting with Gabriel and now choirs of them – and shepherds and others are telling her that this very human event involving pain and blood and umbilical cord and lactation was something in which God was very much engaged and would have consequences for all of humanity and for God!
Now, we have two thousand years of devotion and doctrine and discipleship under our belts, for good and for ill and Jesus-as-God, being the correct doctrinal assertion, is something we’re accustomed to, probably our starting place. The challenge for us may be in truly grasping the full humanity of Jesus – and really getting that the true and full humanity of Jesus is the miraculous working of God. And that this true and full miracle that God does in the incarnation speaks also to us about the miracle of our own creation and of our own being and calling as human creatures.
For a short but unfortunately formative time in my youth I was a member of an evangelical congregation of a different denomination that was particularly fond of the passage we heard from Philippians just now. But their reading of it looked a bit more like one of the origin stories of a DC or Marvel superhero. It went like this: Jesus, having always been a part of God’s own being, chooses heroically to cloak his divinity for the most part whilst walking around here on earth, being obedient to a divine plan that of course he really was in on from the beginning but choosing to hide. Jesus – God – for our own good chooses to withhold something of the fullness of Jesus’ identity except for those special miracle moments. Essentially, God’s activity in Jesus was a teaser: for thirty three years God was present as Jesus, but withholding for the most part those super-powers of omniscience and omnipotence, knowing all things from the beginning but choosing not to let us in, for our own good.
This led to all sorts of speculative conversations about Jesus’ suffering, for example, which no one doubted was ‘real’, but certainly wasn’t full, and of course, didn’t have any effect on God and was something done for us, not something that we could relate to, and certainly not about Jesus relating to our suffering. The spiritual life was construed to be one of discipline to keep our minds above the things of this world, to separate ourselves away from any who aren’t in on the great secrets which God holds in Jesus. In its most extreme expression, which grounded the spirituality of some people close to me, Christian living meant that this life is merely and nothing more than a waiting room for a heaven reserved for those who kept all the rules here on earth. Our being as humans, far from being a gift, was seen only as a testing ground for our discipline. Discipleship boiled down to being a “Good Christian” which meant avoiding sin, which meant a spiritual life ordered by avoidance, over-scrutiny, fear of doing the wrong thing. Even the music in this place was particularly starved of imagination – performed with precision and correctness, good playing, with little of true human expression in it.
I went on to study theology to work out for myself in dialogue with the much longer and wider Christian tradition why this way that I’d been taught was making me less satisfied, more anxious, less comfortable in my own skin, and more fearful of making my way through this world. In short, I found it at odds with the life of being human, enjoying life, learning to receive and give love, and in fact, at odds with living a spiritual life. I learned that this way of discipleship was based on what essentially was one of the main early church heresies: the refusal to accept the full humanity of Jesus, and the nature of God’s gift of this humanity – Jesus’ humanity and our own.
With these good folks I share a belief that to be Christian is to live a spiritual life; what I’ve come to grasp more deeply is that the Christian spiritual life flows freely from God’s own life, and God is not stingy. Rather than a withholding, controlling God who sends us Jesus only wrapped up in the appearance of humanity, I see now in the great hymn in Philippians the outpouring of a stream of love from God that started with God’s loving creation of the world including us, and continues with God’s outpouring of God’s own very self fully immersed into the whole thing of what it is to be human.
What is at stake in this?
One day a spiritual teacher asked his disciples why God made humans. One of them – an eager young man – answered almost immediately, “That, teacher, is easy. So we can pray.” After a brief silence, the teacher asked another question: “why, then, did God make angels?” The same young man tried again, “Perhaps so that they also could pray.” The teacher looked at him and smiled, “the angels, he said, “are perfectly capable of offering prayer to God, but only humans can do what they are ultimately created to do.” “What is that?” the eager disciple asked. “What God wants from humans and what only humans can do is to become fully human.” (David Benner, Soulful Spirituality, pp 10-11)
Saint Irenaeus of Lyon, who lived in the second century, understood this teaching. Famously, he declared in writing that was intended to ward off heresies, that the glory of God is humanity fully alive: God’s glory is seen when we – you and me, people of all sorts – are fully alive, fully human as God wants us to be. Rather than a stingy, controlling God, this is a God whose love and forgiveness and call to new life meets us in each moment, pouring these graces out from the core, the ‘heart’ of God’s own being into us, we humans.
What are we mortals that God should be mindful of us? We right here, right now, are God’s delight, the ones whom God loves; not us once we’ve been purged or reached some form of perfection that can only be attained after this life, but right here, right now, we live and move and have our being within the current of grace that sees, accepts, and loves us just as we are, and invites us into a journey to become more, not less, human; to become more, not less loving and forgiving; to become more alive, not less, more courageous to explore our own interior lives, and more welcoming of imagination.
Canadian psychologist and spiritual director David Benner writes of Saint Irenaeus’s insight eighteen hundred years ago that this was a high point in the Christian understanding of the importance of being human, a point so removed from the centre of so much of what we think is Christianity today that it might almost sound heretical. “Could it possibly be true that being human is a good thing, neither a sign of failure or weakness nor a sign of a lack of spirituality? Is it even conceivable that wholeness as a human being, not simply (some form of) holiness, honours God? Is it possible that there could be an alternative to living carefully so as to avoid sin whilst pursuing the elusive goal of perfection? And could that alternative really be as simple as being and becoming deeply human and fully alive?” (Benner, Soulful Spirituality, p. 11)
For all that the incarnation is about, God becoming human, it is surely about this, that God’s outpouring of love in the gift of Jesus’ full humanity draws us more deeply in to that original outpouring of love by which God created us in the first place.
There is a second clause to that sentence from Irenaeus: the glory of God is humanity fully alive, and that fully alive life consists in beholding God. And when we look and ponder all these things, with the wonder of the psalmist and the tired, grateful heart of Mary, we can see in Jesus not just all the correct things we know we should see in him, all those other names of saviour, redeemer, rabbi-teacher, but the one named by God as the Lord of God’s gift of life abundant. Beholding Jesus as God’s in-the-fullness-of-time expansive self-outpouring of love should give us pause to ponder in what ways Jesus begs us to accept ourselves also as being part of God’s outpouring of love in our own humanity. To do less than this, to do less than accept this gift, is to sleepwalk into sinful self-centredness in the guise of thinking ourselves either unworthy of God or capable of goodness all on our own. May we all learn the humility of God in Jesus to accept the gift of our own humanity, and to engage all that we are given in memory, reason, skill, imagination in the service of love.
The Revd Dr Eileen Scully