The Humanity of Jesus
by WCBWe all have our favorite verses. Our preacher has a couple of hundred of them. To be fair, we have different verses that appeal to us depending on our mood, our circumstances, the challenges we are facing, the promises we hope will be kept.
How about a least favorite verse? Usually a least favorite verse is the one that hits home, strikes a nerve, the one we understand all too well.
My favorite verses of the Bible are at the end of Mark 7. My least favorite verses are Mark 14: 33-36.
We looked at the latter this past Sunday morning in our weekly study.
The terror of the cross exceeded what Jesus had anticipated. It was going to be worse than even he imagined.
Jesus was confused, restless, and for a moment lost his focus, became distracted. He felt homesick, found himself in a place with which he was unfamiliar. He was distressed. He became utterly depressed. He was in new territory and it was overwhelming.
This mountain climbing carpenter and picture of perfect health was overcome mentally, spiritually. He stumbled as he walked, repeatedly.
He became surrounded by grief and the whole experience was literally killing him.
In a day he would find himself with all the sin and filthiness of mankind heaped upon him unjustly. And, he despised sin. He was going to feel ‘out of love’ with the Father, be separated by death from Him for the first time in eternity.
Just when Jesus thought it couldn’t get worse, it did. He found himself alone. Thinking perhaps that at least his friends were there with him. They weren’t. They had gone to sleep despite his urgings.
The miracle worker, the teacher, the lover, the wise, the clever, the strong, the Creator in the flesh was after all a human, too. And he struggled, yet he never sinned.
It was prayer that kept Jesus strong at his most vulnerable time. It was his absolute resolution to do the Father’s will, not his, that kept him faithful at this most critical of times.
Jesus’ hour had come and he couldn’t have been more prepared. He was there to meet it.
How human is your Jesus?
How prepared are we?
How much more can we grow to be like Jesus?
February 11th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Why, I wonder, are these your least favorite verses?
Yes, the suffering of Jesus is a terrible thing to witness, even in written form, but doesn’t the humanity of Jesus coupled with his sinlessness teach us something important? Isn’t it a good thing that Jesus was human?
After all, how can I even imagine trying to be like Jesus if he was not human?
As I look at the world from Silicon Valley, encountering the humanity of Jesus is good for me. Here in our ivory (silicon) tower, we often forget that we too are human.
February 12th, 2008 at 9:30 am
I wish I could feel a fraction of the passion that Jesus shows in this passage. I’m not talking about any ol’ passion, but the overwhelming need and desire to be in the Father’s presence.
Jesus doesn’t fear his death here — he fears “the cup,” which is prophetic language for judgment. In the moment of his death, he becomes the sin offering for the community, taking on the sin of all of us, becoming sin and incurring God’s judgment. In that moment, Jesus knows he will be spiritually separated from God, and that is his worst nightmare.
What would it be like to be so close to God, that the prospect of leaving his presence for a moment would be a torment?
If I grasped that kind of intimacy, I wouldn’t treat sin as casually as I often do.