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A reflection on what true incarnation means
Some
time ago at a recollection day for youngsters, I was asked how many languages
Jesus spoke. “Aramaic was his own language”, I said, “and he
probably managed a smattering of Greek, as most Jews did in Jesus’ time.
But he would definitely not understand English”.
Julian, a fine Goan lad, was visibly upset by this. “Jesus was God”,
he protested. “He was omniscient. He knew everything. He must have
known English. In fact, it would probably have taken him no more than five
minutes to fill in the Times crossword puzzle. It was all there in his
mind!”.
Julian is, perhaps, not the only one among us who has never realised what
incarnation, God becomes human, really implies. Yes, we believe that
Jesus was truly God and truly human. What we don’t realise is that
becoming human really meant human. To deny the human end misses the point as
badly as denying the divine reality.
Pressed by me, Julian reluctantly admitted that Jesus needed to use his feet to
walk from one place to the next, like anyone else. In fact, that he was not the
fastest runner of his time. That he could be tired and hungry, and would need a
rest from time to time (John 4,6). It had never struck Julian that the
same human limitations would affect Jesus’ mind. That Jesus, like his
contemporaries, could not imagine what an electric train was like, or a motor
car, or a aeroplane. That he could learn new things (Luke 2,52) and
could be surprised (Matthew 8,10).
The
shock we may feel at this realisation was also known to the first Christians.
For them it was the Nazareth scandal. Nazareth was, after all, the most
innocuous of hamlets, a tiny village with at most twenty houses, as archeology
has shown. Small wonder that Nathanael exclaimed, “What good can come from
Nazareth?” (John 1,46).
Moreover, Jesus himself was the carpenter, which properly translated meant the
local handyman (Mark 6,3). He would mend ploughs, fix leaking roofs, fit
new doorposts, build stone fences and work as a farm hand in harvest time. As a
human being he was in all respects like everyone else - just as he wanted to
be. He called himself the “Son of Man”, an Aramaic expression for
“the ordinary person”.
Imagine yourself to be a learned scribe in Jesus’ days. You would, as
likely as not, have looked down on him as a country lad with no education.
Yes,
he had picked up the Hebrew alphabet, like most boys in religious families, so
that he could take his turn in reading Scripture (Luke 4,16). But he had
an uncouth Galilean accent (John 7,52) and his Galilean temper would
flare up on occasion (Mark 3,5; Matthew 21,12-13; Mark 11,12-14).
He
could even make a silly mistake like saying that Abiathar was high priest when
David ate of the consecrated loaves (Mark 2,26), whereas we read in the
Book of Kings that the high priest at the time was Abimelech (1 Samuel
21,1-6). Abiathar became high priest afterwards (1 Samuel 22,20-30).
Since
Jesus had no personal copy of the Bible to consult, he had to remember texts by
heart, from what he had heard at Sabbath readings. Confusing the names of
Abimelech and Abiathar is the kind of memory slip anyone of us could have made.
And it did not invalidate the point Jesus was making. It simply was a human
thing to do.
Jesus
was, of course, highly intelligent and did receive special revelations from the
Father (Luke 10,22). But as a human being he was not omniscient. He was
not, as the Docetic heretics maintained during the first centuries, a divine
ghost using human nature as a mask. No, in order to become truly human, God the
Son had to “empty himself” (Philippians 2,7). He had to give
up, as it were, his divine powers, such as omnipotence, omniscience,
immortality.
Why
would God do a thing like this? Here the answer is really overwhelming. As the
Creed tells us, he did it “for us, human beings, and for our
salvation”. Not for God’s own glory, nor because he needed to so,
simply for us, because he loved us and he wanted to heal us from within, as a
member of the human race, as one of us.
Of
course Jesus is God, and when we pray to him now as the risen Jesus, we can
speak to him in any language, including English. But does it not give us more
confidence when we approach him, to know that he knows our human weakness from
his own experience? Our searching, our confusion, our cry of anguish?
“For ours in not a high priest unable to sympathise with our weaknesses,
but one who has been tested in every way as we are, only without sin”
(Hebrews 4,15).
From ‘Did Jesus Know Everything?’ by John Wijngaards in
Mission Today, March 19, 1999.
John Wijngaards
Follow @JohnWijngaards
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