Divine Birth
I was talking with DCB yesterday about human tendencies in our perception of Jesus. Maybe we humanize him more than we deify him. It's easier for us to understand and identify with the man than with the God. But I think that our real tendency is to mix the two, to find some easy compromise. That's why we struggle with the reality of his birth and his life on earth. He was God, so he naturally should have been good-looking, constantly working miracles, skating through life with the greatest of ease.It's not easy. I'm sure that his birth was full of noise and pain, just like any other. But he WAS God. So there is a whole other way of perceiving that moment of incarnation:
A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. The woman fled into the desert to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.
Maybe we need to satisfy ourselves with our complete inability to see things through a heavenly lens, at least until we arrive ourselves. It boggles the mind to think about God packing Himself into that tiny, helpless body. So I think that the how of it is going to remain beyond me for quite some time. Fortunately, it's not the how that matters.
It's the why.
posted by Thurman8er @ 8:30 AM
2 Comments:
Your blog reminded me of something that Carroll Osburn said at one of the Pepperdine Lectures. He said one of the obstacles to boys and young men becoming followers of Jesus is the notion of Jesus being a “sissy.” He said we need to also emphasize the passages that deal with the “power of God.”
There was great power involved with Jesus battling the Devil in the desert as well as Jesus casting out demons. I think we sometimes make Jesus into the wondering “Shaolin monk,Kwai Chang Caine,” from the Kung Fu T.V. series. Even his character had a side that exuded power.
kglyiol (a kilogram of lyiol)
Sometimes I'm glad my personality just allows me to accept things the way they are without much question.
In the case of God, there are so many things I just don't "get", but I'm so grateful for them.
I will enjoy understanding fully, (which even the thought of "understanding fully", I can't quite wrap my mind around), someday. But for today, I'm just grateful.
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