RMC #41- What if God was one of us?- Part 2
My last post was about how much I was enjoying N.T. Wright’s book: “The Challenge of Jesus”. In the book Wright gives a view of Jesus as being completely human, a Jesus never truly realizing his God-ness until the Resurrection. Wright portrays Jesus’ time in the gardens of Gethsemane in such a vivid human context as to mirror our own pain and suffering, so that I truly felt closer to Jesus. I have had this sense of utter uncertainty, utter desperation and desolation… and while I have never confronted anything like what Jesus was going to confront later that day… but thinking of him as “just a man”, “just like one of us” allows me to [ touch ] what it must have felt to be like Jesus.
So I finished reading the book. There were many more insights and wonderful things to ponder in the book, but more processing must ensue.
So what to read next?
When Suzy and I taught Disciple, I purchased nearly the entire set of William Barclay’s commentaries on the New Testament for use in the course. Recently digging through our moving mess I stumbled upon the two volume set of “The Gospel of John”. I needed no other encouragement to jump into the reading of this wonderful gospel commentary.
As I was reading Barclay’s preface, I came across this section regarding the omniscience of Jesus:
“It is John’s view that apparently miraculously Jesus knew the past record of the woman of Samaria (4:16-17): apparently without anyone telling him, he knew how long the man beside the healing pool had been ill (5:6) before he asked it… John saw in Jesus one who had a special and miraculous knowledge independent of anything which he might be told.”
If Jesus already knew what to a human, was unknowable, then wasn’t Jesus always a God in human form?
And Jesus would never be accused of being ignorant of his gift, so doesn’t it make sense that Jesus always knew he was God?
Thinking of Jesus as wholly and truly human, a man, not unlike me, helps me want to be more like Him. And in his human-ness, even though He was without sin, gives me hope that my life will have meaning and importance in furthering the Glory of God.
Thinking of Jesus as God ties me to changing the way I live my life, for as C. S. Lewis says (and I paraphrase): “Once you understand, you live your life in a new way, for the first faint gleam of heaven is inside of you.”
God wants to tie us to Him through the human-ness of Jesus Christ. Though He was a king, Jesus showed us how to love and how deeply the pain in our lives affects Him.
So as I spin myself in the multiple permutations of “Jesus was truly just a man”, “Jesus was God… and on and on, I realize that this is unknowable to begin with since it was 2000 years ago.
And then I realize that during the seeking, during the attempt to understand, during the yearning to know, heaven had crept up inside of me. The unknowable and the un-understandable gave way to faith and belief.
To strive to know leads to no certainty, but a renewed strength of purpose to live my life in order to know, at my ultimate call, that I have done all that I can do to live with heaven inside of me. And, to direct my steps toward the eternal and to the everlasting toward ultimate understanding and rest.
