Jesus was born into this world human in every way as we are. We do not really get this miracle until we are able to identify with Christ in our shared humanity at every single stage of human development. He went through every stage as a human being. He had no halo around His head, he looked just like us, felt like us, spoke like us and did everything we as humans do. He was not able to tell the future unless the Holy Spirit gave him a word of knowledge, could heal only by the Holy Spirit’s power and was growing in stature before God and man. He had to work for His identity, believe by faith that He was the only begotten Son of God and he had to agree with God’s will on earth as it is in heaven, even as it dawned on Him that His purpose would lead Him to a painful torturous sacrificial death by a Roman killing machine. He lived each moment with absolutely no advantage over us. He was like us in every way and yet without sin. Every choice was made submitted to God; He did only what He saw His Father do, only what the Holy Spirit revealed to Him and he had to be made perfect in His humanity through the things which He suffered. He is the prototype, the blueprint, the first fully human one, the first God-Man, we will all follow in His footsteps as we are made into new creatures . The perfect missionary, He lived loving each moment as pure delight within His human DNA and held that in perfect tension with His nature and character as the Spirit of Christ.

From the start, God could have hit a “reset button” to return everything to pristine condition. He also could have exterminated humanity and started over after the fall. God does neither of these options, He is committed to saving humanity in the most human way possible, from within our ranks. All through the Old Testament, they were waiting for the Messiah to come and make things right. When He finally comes, He is made in their image, looks like them and is in every way human, and He is almost too familiar so much so that in Nazareth His ministry was despised. God could have saved us on a weekend outreach. He could speak as He did in the beginning and recreate everything, yet He doesn’t, He involves us. He also could have come as a superman who swoops in and sets everything right and swoops back out. He did not come as an alien, instead He came as familiar, a perfect missionary into human culture, into human skin, into creation and lives among us, tabernacled with us, just as He was in the Old Testament, except now, He is one with us, one with suffering, one with the sick, the weary, the diseased. He partakes of everything we do completely. He loves to be human, where we recoil from it. He is hands on, accessible, vulnerable, he sweats blood, has dirty feet and groans with compassion for the crowds – the throngs of people that surround Him – hoping for healing, for order, for deliverance and for resurrection life. Jesus then ascends and stays human. So, He came from Trinity to become human and as Human He returns to include humanity into the Godhead forever.

Walking about in human flesh and yet also simultaneously holding everything together as the Spirit of Christ in the same moment, He upholds the rotation of the planets in orbit, holds the very body He is living in and also is a baby, then a child, then an adolescent and then a young man. He apprentices as a day labourer with his father, and after His father passes away he becomes the primary bread winner for the family, His mother, His brothers and sisters. He waits until He is thirty years old before entering His ministry. He shows power over creation, over demonic spirits, over religious and political powers that be and also brings abundance in the feeding of thousands, beauty in the restoration of broken limbs,  healing to broken hearts and comfort for the afflicted. Finally He resurrects even the dead. His power seems to have no end and yet, the disciples keep asking “when are you going to institute the Kingdom?” When will you hit the button on “Kingdom Come”. They want everything to be put right in a moment, and Jesus refuses.

Jesus was a man of many sorrows, but he was also accused by the pharisees of partying too much as well. Pleasure and pain is registered in the same part of the brain. They said to Him why do you and your disciples live a very different type of life than John the Baptist and his disciples? Jesus was familiar with all manner of difficulties and also a man of great joy. He was content in both. He was willing to embrace the full gamut of human existence and to be baptised into great joy and also great pain for us. He grew up with huge expectations hanging over Him. Everybody expected something from him. He was he son of God and had to fulfil every one of the covenants perfectly all while being fully human as we are. He made every moment count from birth to death and lived defying the expectation of the Pharisees, not bowing to political pressures or religious regulations. He was tempted in every way as we are and yet without sin. This was not because he was better than us or because He was the Son of God and we are not. He was like us in every way… So had no advantage over us. On the cross, he bled and died as a human being, just as all human beings do, yet was fully human throughout. We will understand the incarnation only to the degree that we see him as fully human. He went through every stage of life making the right choices against all obstacles and aware of when he was tempted as we are. He is incredible and also exactly like us, perfected through the things which He suffered. Even in Jesus, God wanted Him to feel all that we feel and to take on our disease, our brokenness and our frailty to the point of death and indeed beyond. In the green of Gethsemane his body was pushed beyond its limits as He sweat blood from psychological stress as He contemplated the path God had set before Him. What an incredibly human picture of the Son of God. He asked “if there is any other way, let this cup pass from me” and then resigned His will fully surrendered to God and acted in obedience as a human being. Such pain and sacrifice to lay down His life for His enemies, abandoned by those who He had called to be his disciples as He died a death of asphyxiation on the cross.

Jesus seems to have spent the majority of his life working a normal 9 to 5 job as a day labourer. He did not feel pressure to enter “ministry” because He viewed work differently from us. He knew His work was to be embodied as a son of God and a son of Man. He would have to do equally ordinary and extraordinary things as part of His calling, but he was completely surrendered to God and was in no rush to prove himself nor to show off. He was subtle, telling those He healed, delivered and resurrected to keep quiet about it. He silences demons who recognised Him and yet the throngs of crowds gathered wherever He went. He was both completely down to earth and also out of this world. He knew the power shown in Him was the will and work of the Holy Spirit and that the wisdom he showed as the son was done in submission to His Father. He would have heard the stories of His birth, how angels appeared as well as read the prophecies of the coming messiah and had to grown into understanding of who He was by reconciling these passages to His calling in God. I am sure He grew into this knowledge moment by moment as it was revealed to His finite human mind, will and emotions. What a journey of discovery for a boy from Nazareth, who was born in Palestine and had to flee to Egypt for his life. He was poor, a refugee, and then he became an orphan upon Joseph’s death and his mother became a widow. So He stayed in his work to provide for His brothers and sisters as the oldest son in the family. Only at the age of thirty when He would take on the role of rabbi did He start his official ministry. Confirmed at baptism by the Holy Spirit where God the Father said, “This is my son, in whom I am well pleased!” What confirmation for Jesus to hear these words, which affirmed what He had to fight to understand was His true identity throughout His life, and yet how similar He is to us as we work out our identity and vocational calling too.

If there is any part of your life where you feel there is a chasm between Jesus in his incarnation and your own experience of being human, to that same extent will you fully grasp God’s salvation of your whole person! If I can’t imagine Jesus as a baby, as a teenager with hormones raging or as a kid playing in the neighbourhood, I don’t really know Him. He was born at a disadvantage, and becomes in many ways the lowest common denominator of human life. We know that He was intelligent, that he was able to hold His own in the synagogue and that people were astonished by His confidence and His ability to tell parables that caused revelation to occur in His hearers. He was witty, funny and used different methods each time he healed someone. Often spitting in the dirt and rubbing it on blind eyes, he also spat on a man’s tongue… he told jokes to make a point and adapted his speaking, tone and ministrations uniquely to the audience in front of Him. He had huge compassion, was a friend to the fatherless and a comfort to those in pain. He delighted in healing the sick and releasing captives, identifying needs and tactfully addressing people’s deepest desires, a master communicator, fully embodied and relevant to people’s groaning and deepest longings. He was someone you could be yourself with and also someone you did not want to cross. He knew people’s hearts even when the religious were trying to catch Him out. Even when every meal he was invited to had hidden intentions and false motives, rather than true hospitality, He was sensitive to them and defied expectations. Some were growing disillusioned too. He did not seem to want to confront the powers that be politically, and for the zealots, this was very unsatisfactory. Indeed even to His brothers and mother who pleaded with Him to come home, He seemed oblivious to the dangers ahead. Just as His life began in obscurity, Jesus knew His life would end in infamy, but also victory that at first looks like only crushing defeat.