You know, all of a sudden, I can’t get around the fact that my brain can’t put together Jesus the man and Jesus the Divine. We talk about how these paradoxes of our faith escape our understanding, but I think it’s in my current attempt to follow my Lord that I’ve felt the incomprehensible truth of who He is. Lately I’ve listened to podcasts of Mark Driscoll and Derek Webb who talk about being a “follower of Jesus”. I don’t know that I would have ever put it quite that way for myself. I would definitely call myself a Christian, but being a “follower of” seems to hold different connotation.
But yeah, I’ve recently been on a journey of getting to know Jesus, the man, in reading John’s Gospel. I’m seeing how much of a human being He was (is). He was a “guy”, and He lived perfectly. So I imagine myself as a guy who lives perfectly. “Umm, yeah. Not happening.” So, yeah. Wow, that Jesus pulled it off. And thanks be to God, because He’s my hope, reverently etc., etc.
All of a sudden, Jesus is approachable, much more so than the divine Son of an even more divine God (please pardon any theologically dubious word choice), the God of all transcendence. Now I’m following a Jesus who’s wet footprints I can actually see on the road where he stepped off the surface of some body of water. The transcendent (beyond us) is immanent (close to us), and THAT - .steam whistle. – yeeeah. Brain cells poppin’ left and right. I can’t get that. All of a sudden I’m not as informed as I thought I was. A piece of my contented little ignorance just got called out to duke it out with God’s cosmic truth, and got stomped.
2 comments:
ooo! OOO! I'm doing the same thing...trying to understand the dichotomy of fully God and fully human. My lifelong assumption that the miracles Jesus performed attested to his divinity was shattered a couple of months ago by a conversation that I had with my dad where he pointed out that they mostly attested to his being divinely called. The prophets of the Old Testament and disciples of the New Testament performed miracles -- they even raised people from the dead too! And the more I delve into the concept and think about it, the more I understand why it was the topic of sooo many of the councils!
You're right: that is a mind-blowing concept. And something I know I need to probe further. I agree about what reading John's gospel does: it shows us Jesus's human side, perhaps more so than the other gospels. And at the same time it makes Him more accessible, it makes it so much more obvious exactly how incredible He is. Amen to that.
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