Jesus

God becomes human in the form of Jesus of Nazareth and breaks into the matrix of how things had become in the world.

Essentially he is God. By becoming human he has not changed his character. In essence he totally reflects who God is – Love. Jesus is described as the Son of God - the one who is in essence God, the one who has God’s DNA, the one who stems from God. When we look at Jesus, we can see what God is like. In that sense, Jesus and God are one, the same.

But he is more than God wrapped in human skin. He is fully human, not only in body, but in mind and soul and spirit. Jesus often describes himself as the Son of Man. Not only is he human. He is the ultimate human, the perfect human, a human the way humans were designed by the Creator to be, a human living in the fullness of what being human was meant to be all about. What makes Jesus the ultimate human is not his divinity. It is the fact that as a human he is living fully and completely in the light of God’s Love – just as God purposed for humanity at creation. He is the perfect human because in no way is he separated from God’s Love. He is fully turned to God, fully saturated by Him. That makes him sinless. He is untainted by greed, by self-centredness, by jealousy, by lust for power, by all those things that reflect Satan’s patterns and all those things that smack of death. And so all he does and all he says is steeped and saturated in Love.

Being fully human also means being limited in his attributes. Being human, he is not able to exercise the attributes that God, in his divinity, has the right to exercise. Jesus is not omnipotent (he has limited power), he is not omniscient (his knowledge is limited) and he is not omnipresent (he is limited to time and space). Paul, writing to the believers in Philippi, says that Jesus was in very nature God, but that even so he did not try to be equal to God but that being human, he made himself like nothing. (Philippians 2:6-7)

Jesus’ humanity is crucial in God’s breaking into the matrix of how things are. God, as God, cannot oust the dictator who has set himself up as ruler of the world. Only man can, because it was man who allowed him to take his place as ruler over the world. God, as God, cannot make anyone turn to him. Only man can choose to turn to God and to allow God’s Love to touch him, change him, draw him into relationship with Him. God cannot change the fact that man dies as a consequence of living turned away from God. Only man tastes death.

And so Jesus, as the ultimate human, is the only one qualified to change the matrix. As man he has the authority to dethrone the dictator. As man he is able to demonstrate what a human life looks like when life is lived fully saturated by God’s Love – something he would call life to the full, or eternal life. And as a sinless man, a man saturated by God’s life-giving Love, he is the only human who is able to take the consequence of separation with God, death, and defeat it, reversing death as the consequence of separation with God, offering an antidote to the poison of death.

No wonder then that Jesus is described as the One who Saves, the One who delivers. Only Jesus, God made man, can change the matrix and so be the Saviour of the World.