on May 29, 2025
Dear all at IPC,
In the last month I’ve found real help in thinking on the humanity of Jesus, to spend time meditating on him. We’ve seen in Hebrews, “He is not ashamed to call us brothers” (the word used there translates to include sisters), he has become one of us. It is beyond our comprehension and yet it compels us to worship.
We often sing of this truth glibly at Christmas. The creator of the universe we behold him lying helpless wrapped in cloths. He was an outsider even in his birth as the circumstances of his birth are a source of scandal and his family tree is nothing to write home about. It involved adultery, prostitution and pagan worship, laid out for all to read in the genealogy of Matthew. He was a citizen of a state which was occupied by a foreign power. His earthly parents were too poor to even offer a lamb when he was presented at the temple, they had to offer a pair of doves. For a time as a child he was an asylum seeker in Egypt, part of a refugee family.
He grew up in what seems to be a bit of a dump called Nazareth, a place that people looked down on. He had the normal tensions of family life with brothers and sisters, and the only incident we have of his childhood is his mum complaining ‘why did you stay out so late, where have you been?’ We know next to nothing about his father as he disappears from the narrative quickly. Later in life, his family misunderstood him, at one point they thought he was out of his mind and needed to be removed from public life.
Jesus was a working man, he worked with his hands and knew all about hard graft and sweat. He would have had sore muscles. He would have been aware of the pressures and strains of a small family business.
Each week he went along to the local synagogue and endured boring sermons. Each Sabbath day he heard men mistreat and mishandle the scriptures, and yet he went weekly. Can you imagine what it was like for Jesus a man in his late 20’s to hear how scripture was being butchered by those who should have been Israel’s teachers? Conversely, we can imagine what it would have been like for those who heard him in his early 30’s who remembered him fixing their coffee tables, asking one another, “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?”
The stories he told reflected the community life with which he was familiar: a mother sewing patches on clothes; things that got lost; fishing nets; an unjust judge in a local court. He lived in a very down to earth world. There is an absolute down to earthiness and approachability about Jesus.
Women were numbered among his very best friends at a time when no man would appear in public with a woman and they were treated as second class citizens. Little children were drawn to him; we know his disciples didn’t have time for them but Jesus was different, he welcomed them and lifted them up in his arms. He kept all the wrong company such as prostitutes and other rejects from society. A political pariah like a tax collector who worked for the Romans, gravitated towards him. He was mocked as ‘a friend of sinners’.
He spoke with an accent, a country accent. He was a Galilean. He wasn’t a cultured man. We are told the common people heard him gladly, he spoke in a way that they understood. Jesus was blunt and witty. He described the clergy as whitewashed graves – clean on the outside but rotten on the inside. He poked fun at the Pharisees and told jokes about them: have you heard the one about – that kind of thing. Two Pharisees are sitting in a restaurant having lunch, and one of them notices a fly in the soup bowl of his friend but he hasn’t realised there’s a camel sitting in his own soup. He used that irony to expose the fact the religious leaders saw tiny things in the lives of others but they missed the massive issues that were in their own lives
Jesus got extremely angry at times. We are told that when he healed a man with a shrivelled hand and the Pharisees muttered about it being the Sabbath, he was deeply angry at their attitude. He once famously went into the temple and threw over the tables of the money changers when his Father’s house was at stake.
He knew the whole range of human emotions of hunger and thirst, bereavement and tears. He wept, crying with great sobs at the graveside of a friend. He experienced real disappointment in ministry. He was rejected by his family, betrayed by one of his best friends and let down by the others who forsook him and fled. His end in many ways was a failure, certainly from a human perspective.
He entered into our humanity and all the struggles you and I have in our lives and churches. There is no pressure or struggle that Jesus doesn’t know far more about than any of us.
It is wonderfully encouraging that this man Jesus gets you. He understands you and your world. He is able to sympathise with us with our every weakness. There is no one more worthy of our love and our service. As we meditate on him we are moved to worship.
There is an old chorus which says…
Turn your eyes upon Jesus
Look full on his wonderful face
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of his glory and grace.
Fix your eyes on Jesus,
Your Minister and friend,
Paul