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Like Us, With Us

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by | 13 December, 2013 | 0 comments

What are we to think of ourselves, to make of ourselves, because God became a man in Jesus? How does Jesus help us understand and define our own humanity?

 

By Jon Weatherly

What is a human?

The story is told of two medieval philosophers discussing that question. One said, “A human is a featherless, two-legged creature.” The second excused himself, then returned an hour later with a plucked chicken.

12_Weatherly_JNWe need a better definition. Or perhaps we humans are better off describing our experience rather than formulating a definition.

So what is our experience?

We are like and unlike other creatures. We do what all animals do: we are conceived and born; we eat, drink, excrete, reproduce, and die. We do what we must to survive.

We are not the fastest or strongest of creatures. We are born utterly helpless and require years of nurture to survive with a modicum of independence. But we have an impressive blend of abilities that sets us apart. We walk upright, freeing our forelimbs to manipulate objects. We have large brains that empower observation and imagination, allowing us to devise new ways to solve problems. We have organs for speaking and hearing that enable us to communicate complex messages to fellow humans.

We use our forelimbs and our brains to manipulate our world and its creatures to facilitate our survival and comfort. We do our best at that manipulation when we communicate with other humans and coordinate our manipulation with them. Together we can adapt to almost any of earth”s environments. We have learned to visit all of those places and to thrive in all but the most extreme. We use the earth”s minerals, its plants, and other animals to make our survival more certain and comfortable.

 

Vulnerable

Oddly, the things that make us capable also make us vulnerable. Our long childhoods make us subject to all kinds of dangers. Our upright stature puts stresses on our knees, hips, and back that cause them to break down with time. Our large brains become subject to misalignments of all kinds, making mental dysfunction perhaps our greatest threat. Our fleshiness subjects us to common disease and danger. As these breakdowns accumulate, we become as vulnerable as children again. Our capacities, the things that make us so able to adapt and survive, become our fatal flaws.

We are a paradox of strength and weakness. And in this state, we believe living just to survive is to be debased, to become mere animals, much less than we are supposed to be. We deeply sense we have a higher destiny than other creatures. Our long childhoods and persistent vulnerabilities provoke us to live in relationship with one another, and to those relationships we ascribe profound value. We exalt love, and believe it is our birthright to have it.

Our big brains do more than get us what we need to survive; they impel us to explore and understand our world, to create and enjoy our creations, to understand and connect with other humans. We exalt truth and beauty, and we believe it is our design to know it and live by it.

These capacities and the desires that come with them make us attribute great worth to other humans, even those whose capacities are diminished by youth or age or disability. Valuing others and ourselves, we pursue justice. Life for us has to mean something””something with love, truth, beauty, and justice in it. We seek significance.

But we do not do well in those pursuits. Our search for significance easily becomes a contest for power. Our lust for power replaces truth with lies, love with exploitation, justice with coercion, and beauty with self-glorification. We construct justifications for these trade-offs, but with them we cannot even convince ourselves. So we attempt to restore the purity of our quest with new, corrective endeavors, but none succeeds in genuinely changing us. So in despair we self-medicate, literally and figuratively addicting ourselves as we try anything to dull the ache of our failure.

Our search for significance becomes our great undoing. Afraid of our weaknesses, we destroy one another as we seek power. We sink into self-loathing despair in our failure. Our abilities become disabilities.

And in the end there is death. It comes to us humans too soon: in the helplessness of childhood, in the rigors of our adulthood, in the brokenness of old age. Whenever it comes, it comes bitterly and tragically, severing treasured relationships, extinguishing insatiable creativity and curiosity. Death”s bell tolls for each of us, and whenever it tolls, it tolls for all.

Sometimes we convince ourselves these are modern people”s problems, not those of humans in less perilous times. But many voices from many places and times tell us otherwise, including the voices of Scripture.

 

Different

Scripture affirms our tremendous capacities. Genesis affirms that humans are different from other creatures, set apart by being created in God”s image and given God”s mandate to serve as his vice regents over creation (Genesis 1:26-31; Psalm 8). Yet the unrelenting witness of Scripture is of human failure, human evil, and human suffering. Brother hates brother (Genesis 4:1-12); nation fights nation (Psalm 2:1, 2); disappointment overwhelms hope (Psalm 6:3-7); thanksgiving turns to lament (Lamentations 1:1, 2).

In response, Scripture”s most world-weary book shows us a human who pursues meaning in every imaginable endeavor: in creating, building, loving, learning, and amassing wealth and power to forestall the twin demons of despair and death. Its conclusion? There is nothing we can do to create meaning. All is vanity, emptiness, pointlessness (Ecclesiastes 1:2, 14; 2:11, 17; 3:19).

Scripture not only echoes our modern experience. It explains it. We are like our first parents, who in their paradoxical position of power and weakness listened to the voice of the snake, failing to trust in their Creator and instead grasping for authority that belonged only to him. We are like Israel in the wilderness, vulnerable but failing to trust in God”s provision, at once demanding what he has not promised and turning to our own devices in the vain attempt to overcome the limits of our weakness. Given land and law, authority and freedom, we humans squander our divine gifts, reject divine instruction, and pursue autonomy. Like fools we trade God for power, and so exchange life for death (Deuteronomy 30:15-20).

That biblical description of humanity””that we ourselves are responsible for our plight””is difficult to deny. Whatever other tragedies we suffer, it is our own failures that haunt us most.

We cannot satisfactorily define what it is to be human. But we can describe far too well our experience as humans. Human life is tragic, precisely because humans are endowed with such great capacities and are designed for such a great destiny. Our tragedy is not the fault of a cold, impersonal universe. It is not the fault of the God who made us. It is our fault.

We need a better human. Only someone who is what we are supposed to be can rescue us from the death trap of vanity we have set for ourselves.

 

Rescued

That is the heart of the Christian gospel. God has rescued rebellious, foolish, helpless humans through the divine Son of God fully entering into our humanity. In Jesus, God became one of us. The Christ became incarnate, fully human. In so doing, he experienced everything that we experience. But in so doing he overcame all our self-made faults and foibles””with their tragic consequences.

When God became human, he experienced the same paradoxical blend of strength and weakness all humans experience. Though conceived miraculously, Jesus was nevertheless born like any other baby; in fact, he was born in notably lowly circumstances. His baby bed was a manger (Luke 2:7). To consecrate his birth, his parents made the offering allowed to the poor (Luke 2:22-24). Threatened by a murderous imperial power, his family became refugees (Matthew 2:14, 15). Finally they settled in a town notorious for its insignificance (John 1:45, 46). Though we know little of his childhood, it was apparently unremarkable. He was marked on at least one occasion by precocious wisdom (Luke 2:46-50), yet those who knew him as a child remembered nothing that set him apart (Mark 6:3).

As a man, Jesus displayed extraordinary power that no other human had exercised. It was power that could belong to God alone. Yet not once did he use that power to subjugate others or to meet his own needs. Without exception, he served others, especially those in the deepest throes of human weakness: the sick, outcast, tormented, and hungry, even the dead (Matthew 11:4-6).

That use of power distinguished him from other humans. Other humans, greedy for divine power they did not possess, twisted their divinely granted capacities into petty tyranny. Jesus had the divine power other humans illegitimately sought, yet he used it only to serve others, never for himself.

His success where others failed is epitomized in his battle with the adversary (Matthew 4:1-11). Eve and Adam had taken forbidden food in a grasp for power. Israel in the wilderness had demanded food as a condition of their cooperation. But when invited to serve himself by creating food through a miracle, Jesus refused, trusting God the Father”s provision. In Eden, humans had tested whether God indeed meant what he said. In the wilderness, Israel had tested God by demanding he act as they wanted. Challenged to make a spectacle by demanding the protection that God had promised, Jesus refused to test God. The first humans gave homage to a diabolical snake. Israel bowed to a golden calf. Jesus, when offered rule over the world, refused to worship any but God.

Utterly victorious, utterly true to the image of God that he bore as a human, Jesus was innocent when all others were guilty. Nevertheless, he willingly submitted to all the horrors of death. Indeed, he allowed himself to be tortured to death at the behest of religious leaders and at the hand of the emperor”s authorities.

He experienced all the horrors humans inflict on one another. He underwent the fullness of that horror: to recognize that, one need only listen to him wrestle in prayer before his arrest or shout in anguish and loneliness as he was tortured (Mark 14:34-36; 15:34). Yet some of those around him””even one who was tortured to death with him, even one who did the awful deed””recognized that Jesus met his death differently than others, as one genuinely innocent (Luke 23:41, 47).

Jesus had, in fact, always identified himself with evildoers, though he did no evil. His opponents noted he ate with those whom they regarded as deserving condemnation, but he insisted it was his calling to do so (Mark 2:13-17).

The prophet John had dipped people in Jordan”s waters to ask for God”s promised cleansing of their guilt. As Jesus came to him, John insisted he needed Jesus to cleanse him. But this man insisted that God”s right way meant standing in solidarity with the impure by joining them in plea for cleansing (Matthew 3:13-15).

That solidarity meant that though he was pronounced innocent (Luke 23:22), in his death Jesus was numbered with the transgressors while a guilty man went free (Luke 22:37; 23:25, 33). He put himself in the sinner”s place. Only in so doing could he break evil”s stranglehold on humanity (2 Corinthians 5:21).

And how can we be so confident as to say this man was different from others, that his death was different from others? We say it confidently because death did not hold him (Acts 2:24). His resurrection meant victory over the tragedy of human existence, the beginning of our restoration. The true man has supplanted the first man as our archetype (1 Corinthians 15:22). The Son of Man has defeated the kingdoms of human wickedness to restore us to our destiny (Daniel 7:13, 14; Matthew 26:64).

 

Remade

In Jesus of Nazareth, God became one of us. Thereby he makes us what we were always to be.

As one of us, he refocuses our weakness. We imagine that weakness is our problem, but it is not. Jesus brings God”s power by submitting to our weakness in extreme: he dies on a cross. There can be no doubt that we are to be weak vessels in which God”s strength is made perfect (2 Corinthians 4:7; 12:9).

As one of us, Jesus redirects power. He unfailingly serves others. Our true greatness is to be found in the same (Mark 10:42-45).

As one of us, Jesus redefines victory. Victory is not subjugating others. Victory is submission, service, self-giving. What used to look to us like failure is now revealed as triumph (Philippians 2:1-11).

As one of us, Jesus secures our greatest quest. He is what we find at the end of our search for love, truth, beauty, and justice. His life, unspoiled by selfish mistrust, shows us real significance, the genuine object of our searching (Philippians 3:7-14).

As one of us, Jesus assures us of these despite our persistent failure. He is the high priest who makes atonement in the true temple. But he is the high priest who knows what it is to be one of us, who has suffered just like us in weakness and hopelessness (Hebrews 2:17; 4:14-16; 7:25-28; 9:11, 12).

As one of us, Jesus assures us God knows exactly what it is like to be a feeble, suffering, dying human. Because of the God-man, God is forever with us (Matthew 1:23; 28:20).

What is a human? Look to Jesus of Nazareth.

 

Jon Weatherly serves as professor of New Testament and dean of the School of Bible and Theology at Johnson University, Knoxville, Tennessee.

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