The God Who Grew Up

The God Who Grew Up--January 3, 2018

"When they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him." [Luke 2:39-40]

Jesus was a boy who grew up.  Huh.  How about that.

These few sentences seem so ordinary--like they are talking about just any ordinary boy--and there is a reason for that. Jesus was like any other ordinary boy.

He was.

For whatever else we might have to say about him also being the very Son of God, the most orthodox thing you can say about Jesus is that he is one of us. In fact, the early church fought long and hard to end up saying that Jesus is a perfectly ordinary human (while, yes, also, insisting that Jesus is none other than 100% God at the same time), rather than some kind of curious hybrid, or approximation, or replicant, or divine emanation. Whatever it means, deep down, to be human... Jesus is.  Whatever beauty, whatever fragility, whatever strengths, whatever limits, and whatever capacity for growth come along with being a member of Homo sapiens, Jesus had them all in spades.

And so part of the beauty of such an ordinary-sounding paragraph from Luke about Jesus growing up is precisely that it could be said about just about anybody's teenage child.  They grow up--as they are supposed to do. Jesus did.  Jesus grew strong, and he grew wise.  That's what human beings are supposed to do.  And so... Jesus did, too.

There's a whole rabbit trail worth of theologizing we could do thinking about what it means that God-with-us--the Incarnate God-from-God and Light-from-Light--had a childhood so ordinary you wouldn't know if was your own life story if the names were removed from the page.  And that really is one of the wonders of what the Christian faith has claimed for the last two thousand years: that God (whatever it means to be God) chose to enter into a human life in all its fullness, so that whatever we do actually end up meaning by the word "God" has to also be capable of taking on our humanity, precarious as it sometimes can be.

But let's consider the flip side for a moment.  Jesus not only shows us what God is really like in his willingness to share our life with us, but Jesus also shows us what it really means to be human.

That's saying something... because, honestly, I'm not all that sure we really know what humans are for.  I rather get the impression a lot of the time that we never even ask a question like that--it doesn't occur to us that it might be a question worth asking: "What are human beings for?" Or to put it differently, "What is a well-lived life for a human being?"

But for whatever else Jesus will have to say to us or show to us about God, he also shows us what it means to be fully human ourselves.  That's part of why writers and theologians like Walter Wink suggest that Jesus' favorite title for himself, "Son of Man," from the Gospels, is really best understood as meaning, "The Truly Human One," as in, the one who shows us and embodies what it means to be human.

So maybe it shouldn't surprise us that Jesus the boy grows up, and gets stronger, and becomes wiser.  That's part of what humans are meant for.  That bit about wisdom is more important than we usually give it credit for, too.  It's important, and not just because our culture is not great at realizing the value of real wisdom as oppose to technical knowledge, or celebrity status, or market savvy to make a buck.  Being wise is essentially all about knowing what things are for, and acting accordingly.  

It might not seem controversial to say that wisdom is important in life... but if we are going to grant that Jesus was and is "full of wisdom," as Luke says, then it will mean that we are compelled to accept that Jesus' view of the world, Jesus' "take" on life and humanity and God, and Jesus' way of engaging the world, are what wisdom looks like, rather than whatever other convoluted, self-interested schemes we might come up with.  Jesus is wise--confessing that means admitting that Jesus just might know more than I do about what it means to be human.  And in turn, the wiser we become, the more and more we will become like Jesus himself.  

I am reminded of a line of Dallas Willard's from The Divine Conspiracy in which the theologian writes something like this: Jesus is not only Lord, but he is smart.  If you can line up with other churchgoers and profess the first one (Jesus is Lord) by heart without batting an eyelash, but have to pause, look around, and blush before you can say the second (Jesus is smart), you've missed the point of the Christian faith.  Willard's point is a good one--if we say Jesus is Lord but just don't think he's being "reasonable" or "realistic" when he says things about the way God runs the universe on justice and mercy, we don't really believe that Jesus is Lord.  No, in that case, we are just trying to use Jesus as our empty religious mascot or figurehead, onto whom we can project anything we like.

To say that Jesus shows us what it really means to be human is to admit that in so many ways, we aren't that good at being human. We are, rather, terribly inhuman to one another, to ourselves, to the world, and to God.  And what Jesus offers us in all his humanity is a picture of what it would look like if we let him bend us out of the knots we have tied ourselves into, and turn us outward to each other, to God, and to creation.  That is what we were meant to be all along, and Jesus gives us that--he shows it to us in himself, and he also creates it within us.  Like the old church father Irenaeus used to say, "The glory of God is a human being, fully alive."  When we are human--fully human and what we were meant to be, in practicing mercy and justice, love and forgiveness, beauty and courage, owning our fragility and unafraid of others' strengths--we are indeed a glimpse of God the Master Artist's glory.  We are, in those moments, as we were always made to be, "the image of God."

It is in the moments we slide back into silly, childish contests of whose stick is bigger, whose brains are smarter, and whose face is more lovely, that we somehow become less than we were meant to be.  And that--precisely that--is what it means to embrace Jesus' kind of wisdom rather than anybody else's.  The world's conventional wisdom says you have to brag and puff yourself up and threaten and cajole and make yourself look bigger, stronger, and tougher than the next person, or else you'll be a laughingstock.  It is the currency of bullies throughout history to play the "my-fist-is-bigger-than-yours" game, and it reveals how deeply insecure and in-human we really are when we deal in such thinking.  But Jesus' kind of wisdom--Jesus' way of being human, so to speak--says that we are at our most glorious when we abandon the gamesmanship and brinksmanship and braggadocio and live vulnerably, opened outward to the world rather than bent in on oneself.

To say that Jesus grew up and became strong and wise is not only a classic creedal declaration that Jesus is fully human like you or me; it is also to say that Jesus--the Truly Human One--reveals what it means to be fully human, over against all the many was we self-centeredly settle for less than humanity toward one another. 

Praise be to the One whose glory is in the face of a child who grows up.

Lord Jesus, show us--and make us more fully into--what true humanity looks like.