|
The traditional Christian view of Jesus is that he was both perfectly God and perfectly human. Yet this raises an important issue: how can God and man coexist in the same body? After all, while human beings have limited power and knowledge, God’s power and knowledge are unlimited. So how, practically, did it work? For instance, did the young Jesus ever get the wrong answer at school? Did he ever face the frustration that we all face when trying to learn a language?
On the whole, the church has given two answers to such questions: the first is to ignore them and pass on swiftly and the second is to say we don’t know and it is pointless speculating. Neither answer is satisfactory. In fact, many people assume that it is quite impossible that Jesus could be both truly God and truly human.
The first thing to say is that this is an undeniably complex area and there is a lot we do not understand. Nevertheless, some helpful suggestions have been made, and we repeat them here because they may help those who find such matters troubling.
The issue of God’s power is easier to deal with than God’s knowledge, so let’s start there. The Bible presents Jesus as someone who was able to exercise divine power and authority, in that he could do such things as calm storms, raise the dead, heal the sick and turn water into wine. Yet it seems obvious that for Jesus to be truly human, he could not be an invulnerable and all-powerful being. Clark Kent may have been the ‘Man of Steel’ but we aren’t, and Jesus wasn’t either. And this is not simply something that we deduce from theoretical arguments; the fact is that the gospels portray Jesus as being totally and completely human: he was tired, hungry, thirsty and ultimately he was killed. So presumably, although Jesus had access to God’s power, there were times when he did not choose to use it. There is a hint of this when Jesus stops his disciples defending him at his arrest: ‘Don’t you realise that I could ask my Father for thousands of angels to protect us, and he would send them instantly?’
Presumably, Jesus only used such power as he knew his heavenly Father would want him to use.
Such a principle no doubt also applied to the issue of how much Jesus knew. Clearly, Jesus did know many things that ordinary people cannot know, yet there were some things he was not aware of. Luke’s reference to Jesus growing ‘both in height and in wisdom’ implies that Jesus learnt as we do. It seems that while Jesus always had a right to divine knowledge and could have used it, he only made use of such knowledge as he knew his heavenly Father wanted him to. Jesus allowed his obedience to his Father to limit both his power and his knowledge.
Such a suggestion not only helps us make sense of how someone who was God could at the same time be totally human, it also shows us a Jesus who is a helpful model of obedience. The book of Genesis tells how the human race’s slip into rebellion began with disobedience against God. The gospels tell us that the answer to this rebellion came when Jesus lived out an entire life of obedience to God.
The New Testament does not try to answer how Jesus is God and how he relates to the Father; it simply ‘tells it like it is’. For the gospel writers, the mechanics of how the incarnation worked are not the issue. Ultimately, all we really need to know is that in Jesus, God came to this world to reach out to us.
|
