A Christmas Truth: Jesus Was Human. And So Are We.
The Christmas story is startling. Ponder these details:
- Jesus was born, God’s son, God physically on earth.
- Jesus was born, rather than just apparating as an adult king.
- Jesus was born in a barn with hay and animals.
- Jesus was born and wise men and shepherds came to worship him. (I wonder what they found to talk about over by the punch bowl.)
But this year, the detail that has startled me most and been hard for me to get away from is that Jesus was a human.
This is not to say that Jesus wasn’t truly divine. In some amazing way, Jesus was both God and a man. Lots of people have written a lot about that. And while I admit that I don’t fully understand it, I’m okay with some mystery.
We Christians (and maybe Evangelicals in particular), however, seem to elevate the spiritual side of life. We want to pray more. We want to stop sinning. We want to stop wanting the wrong things. We want to really worship God.
None of this is wrong. But we can often be experts at missing the point. It’s like we long to be angels, out of our bodies, even though we are made to be here, fully in our bodies.
We Christians need to figure out how to be human. ()
The Invitation from Jesus
This Christmas, I’m startled by Jesus’ humanity. He was born. He cried. He grew. He learned things. He entered his father’s carpentry trade. He ate. He healed others. He provided for others. He died. Then he was alive again.
Jesus was God as a person, and he was really human…
Which means I’m supposed to be human too.
So Christmas this year feels like an invitation.
It’s an invitation to be human—to savor great food, to lose ourselves in music, to laugh until we can’t breath, to love and to be loved, to sit for long conversations with friends, to grieve and lament with real tears, to celebrate like nobody’s business, to be quiet, to accept our limits, and to take a deep, content breath.
Just like Jesus.
