Why is Jesus Human?


May 19, 2015 J. R. Daniel Kirk

For the past six and a half years I have been working on a book whose end is now in sight. I’m calling it A Man Attested by God: the Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels.

The question that has pushed me to endure through all of the trials and tribulations of the writing has been this:

What does it matter that Jesus was fully human?

Through no fault of the churches I grew up in, I think that I had a fairly flat understanding of the identity of Jesus and what it meant:

  1. Jesus is God. Therefore, all of the awesome stuff Jesus does he does (a) because he is God and (b) for the express purpose of demonstrating his deity.
  2. Jesus is human. This is because (a) we suck, so (b) Jesus has to be able to die for us.

The only value to be found in his humanity was his death. Or, if we wanted to expand it a little bit, as in Hebrews, we might say that he occupied the same sucky existence we have (temptations to sin and the like) but managed to get to the cross unscathed.

So he could die for us.

Because we suck.

But the tide began to shift in my own thinking when I realized that proposition (1) above really only approximates the narrative strategy of John’s Gospel. When I tried to read the Mark with that same lens, the story didn’t hold together.

Read more at http://www.jrdkirk.com/2015/05/19/why-is-jesus-human/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spikenard Sunday/Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut

by Columbia Lutherans on Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 11:55am • THE SERMON “I am enchanted by the Sermon on the Mount. Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have received so far. Perhaps we will get another idea that good by and by-and then we will have two good ideas. What might that second good idea be? I don’t know. How could I know? I will make a wild guess that it will come from music somehow. I have often wondered what music is and why we love it so. It may be that music is that second good idea’s being born. “I choose as my text the first eight verses of John twelve, which deal not with Palm Sunday but with the night before-with Palm Sunday Eve, with what we might call ‘Spikenard Saturday.’ I hope that will be close enough to Palm Sunday to leave you more or less satisfied. I asked an Episcopalian priest the other day what I should say to you about PalmSunday itself. She told me to say that it was a brilliant satire on pomp and circumst...
Read more

The Parable of the Talents – A View from the Other Side

May 18, 2010 http://godspace-msa.com/2010/05/18/the-parable-of-the-talents-a-view-from-the-other-side/ As promised here is the second article on economics as presented in the Parable of the Talents .  It presents a very compelling and challenging view of this parable that I think has a lot to say in our present economic situation . This articles is from “Towering Trees and Talented Slaves”, commentary of Ched Myers and Eric DeBode, originally published in  The Other Side Online, © 1999 The Other Side, May-June 1999, Vol. 35, No. 3. The complete article was originally published atwww.theotherside.org/archive/may-jun99/myers.html. The article is no longer available at that site and apparently has all but disappeared from the Internet. The Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30   Even more problematic than our sentimentalizing of kingdom parables is the way we misread Jesus’ parables about the world, reading them as if they were kingdom parables—with disastr...
Read more

How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform

Image
  It's bad enough that the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law. Even worse is the way they did it - with a big assist from Congress and the White House. By Matt Taibbi May 10, 2012   President Barack Obama signs the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act alongside members of Congress in 2010. ROD LAMKEY JR/AFP/Getty Images Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he'd dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. "These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history," the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. "In history ." Th...
Read more