Jesus, fully human
Readings: Micah 5. 1-4, Hebrews 2. 5-18 & Luke 1. 26-38.
I wonder, what do you make of Jesus? Last week we considered how God the Son is eternal just as God the Father is, so this week we come to consider his becoming human, incarnate, in the person of Jesus and some of what that means for us. What do you make of Jesus?
I don’t about you but for me it feels really odd to hear two of those readings, so tied as they are to Christmas and Carol services, they feel about 6 months too early. We’re in the third part of our series on the Nicene Creed and the second part of four looking at the person of Jesus. And today we’re wrestling with the question of what it means for God to become human, so the perfect readings for today.
That section from Micah, so tied up with Christmas for us, speaks in two directions. He speaks of a new ruler being raised up for God’s people, one whose greatness will reach to the ends of the earth. But he also speaks of this ruler as one whose origins are from of old, from ancient times, and hopefully as you heard that your mind went back to last week to thoughts of the eternal Son. A new ruler coming, but one whose origins have already happened even when Micah is prophesying some 700 years before Jesus is born.
And the Creed, having established the Son is eternal, reiterates this and holds that tension found in Micah as it continues ‘For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven; by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and was made man’. It’s remarkably short in some ways but each word counts, each chosen carefully to counteract various heresies around at the time, many of which are still around in some form or another. Because the incarnation is another thing it’s hard to get your head around, and is likely to cause offense to some, and so people have been misunderstanding it or trying to explain the awkward aspects away since the earliest days of the faith.
First he came down. I hinted at this a little last week, but what we have in the incarnation is the Son leaving heaven to come to us. Wrapped up in that little phrase ‘he came down from heaven’ is a revisit of everything the Creed has just said about Jesus, he has always existed. And I don’t want to labour that point, we thought a lot about it last week, but I do want a bit of a run at it again from a different angle, because this section gives us a different angle.
One group on the other side of Nicea and the following councils were the Adoptionists. And they in all their different guises, hold that Jesus to start with was just a man. That he was just like you and me. Some even dispense with the Virgin birth, he’s just the son of Mary and Joseph. He’s just an ordinary bloke except that he kept the law perfectly, and so God adopted him, made him a god, gave him a delegated divinity. They tend to point to Jesus’ baptism for this as the Spirit descends and the Father speaks they think of this as the moment he was adopted as God’s Son and given various attributes of deity, god-ness. They resolve the tension of divine and human by ditching Jesus’ eternal divinity, he wasn’t a god before, now he is. Simple. We’ll be thinking about that and what that would mean for us more next week. But for now it will do to simply say that’s not what the Bible witnesses to us about Jesus. It falls short. ‘He came down’ as the Creed says. Jesus is fully divine, God himself. As I said last week he has always been from eternity everlasting. He always was God, God the Son. He came down from heaven is once again putting a nail in the coffin of adoptionism, it simply isn’t true.
But alongside the Adoptionists who took offence at the idea of God becoming human and so made Jesus merely a man, resolving the tension by making Jesus a man who became a god, there were various other heresies throughout the first four centuries that took the opposite solution. Jesus was fully God, but not really human.
There were some, Docetists, I’m not expecting you to remember any of these names by the way, who held that Jesus was fully God, but only appeared to be human. He wasn’t really flesh and blood, he didn’t really suffer, didn’t die. In fact, they argued, on Good Friday he and Simon of Cyrene swapped places and Jesus escaped and it was Simon who was crucified. The idea that God would become human was incredibly offensive to them. Flesh and the physical was everything that was wrong with the world, we needed to escape, cast off our physical existence and ascend to the purity of the spiritual. You’ll be unsurprised to hear that they followed a very strict way of life, rejecting almost everything in trying to be more spiritual and cast off the world and the physical.
Perhaps you can identify a little with their approach. Flee from the physical with its pain and suffering. Flee from the world with its chaos but also its demands of us. Flee from those around us and find peace far from it all, ascend above it all.
To them the idea of God becoming human was the exact opposite of what should happen, we’re to escape the flesh and become spirit, not God doing the opposite. And the idea that Jesus suffered, God can’t suffer, he’s above that sort of thing, it broke their assumptions and so they rejected it, rejected those portions of the Bible or tried to explain them away.
But Jesus really is human, he really is flesh and blood. The Creed declares that he becomes incarnate, enfleshed in the womb of Mary. As we hear Gabriel saying to Mary in our Gospel reading today ‘you will conceive and give birth to a Son’. Jesus is a proper human being, with all that you’d expect about a proper human being, except he is born to a Virgin.
But later down the line came the Apollinarians, they were of a similar mind to the Docetists, God couldn’t become human. But they were more subtle, they said that Jesus was fully man as far as his physical body was concerned, but where we’d have a human mind and soul, that’s where the divine Son went, the divine mind and spirit. When I was training, we called this view ‘spacesuit Jesus’. Jesus is basically God the Son piloting a human body. And so once again you’re safe from God fully becoming human, you keep the physical and spiritual somewhat separate. And it’s a simple solution to the question how does God become man; perhaps that’s how you think of Jesus. Jesus is essentially a human body with God inside. It’s a simple solution to the question, you can get your head around it.
But that’s not what we find in the Bible, that’s not what we find about Jesus. Because if Jesus is essentially God the Son in a spacesuit, he can’t be tempted as we are, there’s no human mind or will to tempt, and God’s will is fixed, and yet that passage from Hebrews tells us he experienced temptation. And it tells us that he ‘learned obedience through what he suffered’, yet God cannot learn, he knows everything. And more than that the Apollinarians said that only Jesus’ body was capable of suffering, not his mind or spirit. And yet we see him in agony in the garden at Gethsemane, the suffering and anguish on the cross which is more than just physical. If Jesus is human on the outside but God on the inside he can’t experience our inner lives as we do, he doesn’t have a human mind or will, he’s still just God, he’s just cosplaying as being human.
No, as we heard at the end of that reading from Hebrews ‘For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God’. Jesus is fully human in every way, including a human mind and will.
In the Creed in saying he ‘was made man’, it’s rejecting those other views, Jesus doesn’t just appear to be human, nor is he God piloting a human body, Jesus is both fully God and fully man. The Church Father’s talk about him being one person with two natures. He is one person – Jesus Christ, but two natures, human and divine. Jesus is both fully God, the eternal Son who has existed always, and has become fully human in the incarnation. He’s God the Son become God our brother as that passage from Hebrews tells us, ‘Jesus is not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters’.
As the fourth ecumenical council at Chalcedon declared in 451, 126 years after the first ecumenical council in Nicea, yes it took them that long to properly get this worked through, ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood…of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood; like us in all respects apart from sin; as regards his Godhead, begotten of the Father before the ages, but yet as regards his manhood begotten, for us and for our salvation, of Mary the Virgin, the God-bearer’.
Jesus is fully God and fully human. He’s both 100%. He’s not a blend of the two, or part of each, he’s fully divine, fully human. And if that’s stretching your brain you’re not alone. Once again the Creeds are there to provide boundaries to what we believe, excluding teaching that falls short of the truth, they’re not there to make everything nice and crystal clear and sorted.
But why does it matter that we think about Jesus in this way, why does it matter that we get this right?
Firstly because it means that nothing that is truly human is lost in redemption. If Jesus is fully human, as well as fully God, that means that he affirms all that is good in our humanity, both our physical nature, and our minds and wills. To be human is to have been created in the beginning good, yes we have fallen, yes we are not as we should be, that’s why the incarnation is necessary, but as we were first made we were good.
Which means, to paraphrase Karl Marx’s famous line that workers ‘have nothing to lose but their chains’, so we have ‘nothing to lose but our sin’. God the Son become human is an affirmation that we were first created in the image of God, and that through the Spirit we are being remade in that image, not scrapped and made into something new. Nothing of our humanity is lost in our salvation but the sin that made it necessary.
But secondly the orthodox view of Jesus, that he is both fully God and fully human, with everything that entails, means that Jesus gets us. He understands what it is to be human, fully and completely apart from sin. In the person of Jesus God knows what it is to be us from the inside. And so he empathises with us, truly. He knows what it is to suffer, to grieve as he wept over the grave of Lazarus, what it is to be tempted as he was in the desert, to hunger and thirst as he did on the cross. And as both our Saviour and brother, as our advocate in heaven he speaks for us.
When you pray to him in your sorrows and frustrations, in your pain and bewilderment, when you cry out asking why, Jesus knows what it is like, he truly knows and understands. As the writer to the Hebrews puts it in chapter 4 ‘Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need’.
My brothers and sisters, in your weakness, in your sin, in your humanness, fallen as it is, come to Jesus, fully God and fully man, and you will find both the one who is full of true compassion and empathy, and the one who is overflowing in mercy and grace both to cover us and lift us up. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and shall be forever.
Amen.