Archive: In Search of a Down-to-Earth Jesus

The Meaning of the Incarnation for Today

By Robert G. Tuttle, Jr.

The more that I travel around the country speaking to Christian groups, the more I worry that we are losing track of the biblical Jesus. I get nervous every time someone describes Jesus as if he were Superman, with superhuman strength and X-ray vision. This is not the time to lose sight of our biblical Jesus.

No doctrine is more precious to the Christian than the Incarnation—God become flesh. This is the season to celebrate a God who loved us to the point of being emptied into human flesh so that we might know God and, equally important, that God might know us, save us, and teach us how to live our lives in communion with God’s already continuing intercession. By becoming human, God’s sympathy for humanity was turned to empathy. The Creator experienced creation in a brand new way. For a moment let us take a look at the full significance of a most important aspect of this Advent—an incarnation indeed!

Fully human, fully God

Over the summer I read two books which wrestled with the divine/human aspects of Jesus Christ. One spoke of God and Christ as interchangeable but struggled with Christ’s humanity. The other spoke of Jesus and humankind as interchangeable but struggled with his divinity. Obviously, there is truth in both. Historically the Church has affirmed through her creeds and the consensus teaching of her most influential theologians that Jesus of Nazareth was fully human as well as fully divine. Do not be embarrassed if you cannot get your “gray matter” around that thought. Our brain cells simply begin to short circuit when contemplating such matters. Logically they will not compute. Someone has said that “heresy is born when little minds attempt to solve big paradoxes.”

Nonetheless the doctrine of the incarnation is absolutely essential. I am not asking you to check your brain at the door of the church. I am simply asking you to consider the significance of such a teaching for your own salvation. The alternatives are frightening.

Some have attempted to resolve the issue of the two natures of Jesus Christ with talk of a mutant mixture—the mythical centaur, half and half. Others have painted Christ so heavenly bound that we cannot identify with Him, nor He with us. Please do not give me a Jesus with his feet off the ground! Jesus Christ as God incarnate left behind all the divine attributes fully resident in the pre-existent Son but not available to flesh and blood. He had no “supercharger” while bound to his earthen vessel. He had no fifth gear unavailable to the more conventional human vehicle. Admittedly no analogy will carry the weight of such a thought, so why is it so critical to insist that the part of God that became human flesh was fully human—incarnate indeed? There are several reasons.

The Necessity of the Blood

Some have difficulty with any mention of blood. In my opinion their argument is with Scripture, not with me. “The law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” (Hebrews 9:22, NIV). Still, why mention the necessity of the blood in the Advent season; isn’t that a topic for Lent? The answer is fairly straightforward.

The blood became obvious in the very advent of a Messiah who, though fully God, emptied Himself and became as we are in every respect. I once heard a television evangelist exclaim: “Don’t give me a Jesus in a hair shirt and sheep under his arm. He now rules at the right hand of glory.” A glorified and powerful savior is much easier to preach about and rely upon than a poor and peaceful servant.

Don’t give me a yuppified, success-oriented Jesus in a pinstriped suit and Wall Street Journal under His arm. The Jesus Christ of glory still bears the marks of the Incarnation, not only in His bands, side, and feet, but in His navel, because the passion began not on “the night in which He was betrayed,” but in the manger. It had to hurt God to be squeezed into human flesh and implanted in a real mamma, to be born a real baby, who cried real tears, who experienced real temptation, the fatigue of real ministry, the agony of a real cross, the shedding of real blood. All of this was done because our salvation is secured by a real sacrifice sufficient for a real covenant eternal in the heavens.

We must also remember that Jesus was not turned into human flesh. Jesus became human flesh. To use a rather crude analogy, if I were suddenly turned into a frog, I would still have my own mentality (some folks do not think this old frame is far from frog anyhow). If I were to become a frog, however, I would have the frog mentality. Jesus Christ, God incarnate, took on our mentality as well as our frame so that a real atonement for real sin would deliver us from real darkness into forgiveness and light-incarnate indeed!

Empathy, not just sympathy

As a result of that emptying, that identification, God does not have to imagine bow we feel when we hurt inside; God knows because God has been here. Argue with that and again argue with Scripture: “He [God’s own Son] had to be made like His brothers in every way, in order … that He might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because He himself suffered when He was tempted, He is able to help those who are being tempted” (Hebrews 2:17-18, NIV). That is the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy can only imagine how one feels because it has never really been there, but empathy knows how one feels because it has been there in every respect.

I once had a neighbor who had been burned badly in a fire but who had survived against all odds. Some years later he was asked to visit a man who was dying of burns. As he walked into the hospital room he simply spoke to the man: “Sir, get your ‘buns’ [rough translation] out of bed; you’ve got no right to die; you’ve not been burned nearly as badly as I was burned.” Within fifteen minutes the man was on his feet and within two weeks he was out of the hospital. Not long afterwards, my neighbor was introduced to the man’s doctor who said: “Without your empathy my patient probably would have died.” My neighbor had been there. God has been here, as well. “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel for he has visited and redeemed his people” (Luke 1:68, RSV)—incarnate indeed!

If Jesus was fully human, how did He perform the supernatural?

If the Son of the living God emptied Himself so that he had no superhuman advantage while he walked the dusty roads of time and space, then how did He do the things that He did? How did He remain sinless? How did He perform the marvelous “signs and wonders”? How could He “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but make himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and become obedient to death—even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:6-8, NIV) Again, the answer is fairly straightforward—by the Holy Spirit. This brings us with a rush to one of the most significant points of all this. If Advent celebrates a real Incarnation, then Jesus Christ as fully human had to depend upon the power of the Holy Spirit to sustain and empower Him.

One of the biggest sins mentioned time and again throughout the Bible is the sin of self-reliance. If Jesus Christ had to rely upon God’s Holy Spirit how much more must we rely upon God’s Holy Spirit. Fortunately, the same sustaining power of the Holy Spirit available to Jesus and His disciples is available to us.

In effect, we as the Church are called to do the things that Jesus did (in fact, even “greater works” if we believe the Scripture, John 14:12). As the Church we are the body of Christ. That is no metaphor. We are not like unto the body of Christ, we are “the body of Christ” (I Corinthians 12:27, NIV). Faith in the incarnate Son of God teaches us about God, it saves us as our sins are covered by His blood, and it makes available the sustaining power of the Holy Spirit as we are baptized by the Holy Spirit into the body of Christ—incarnate indeed. Let God arise!

Robert G. Tuttle, Jr. is the E. Stanley Jones professor of Evangelism at Garrell-Evangelical Seminary in Evanston, Illinois and a contributing editor to Good News.