Back in The Age today with this piece about the humanity of Jesus:
Earlier this year, my high-school sweetheart and I celebrated our 33rd wedding anniversary. That’s how long Jesus was alive.
Jesus didn’t have to be a good person for very long. I’ve thought of this often through the years of an undoubtedly lucky life that has nonetheless had its share of normal struggles, including times when it has not been easy to be decent, strong and kind.
Christians are told we should follow the example of Jesus who was the perfect person and who always did the right thing, made the best choices. I don’t find this particularly helpful.
And when you read the gospels, Jesus is by no means all sweetness and light. He is recorded as having bad days. Like any normal teenager, he was incredibly thoughtless when he stayed behind in the temple at Jerusalem, talking to the wise men (how precocious!) without telling his folks.
He snapped at people, called them names (‘snakes and vipers’ comes to mind) and more than once told genuine non-Jewish seekers that it wasn’t his job to help them, he had only come for his own people. When his disciples asked how they were to feed the crowds who had come to listen to Jesus, he said, in effect, ‘Oh for goodness sake, I don’t know, you work out what to do!’
And he only had to live with integrity for 33 years. Many of us these days are likely to have to make good choices for three times that long.
I find this very human Jesus a much more compelling and attractive model. I don’t want to follow some sort of perfect automaton; I want my ideal human to be someone who struggled and became weary and sad and sometimes cranky.
Just because I think he was human, though, doesn’t mean I don’t believe he was uniquely, the ‘human face of God’. One of the cornerstones of Christian belief is that the big God who made the universe cared enough to become a messy, ordinary human being. Many people have trouble with that; all I can say is that other cultures less limited by blind allegiance to the rational have no trouble accepting a mystery such as a divine being who can be fully human.
Because I struggle just as much as the next person with being kind to myself and others, with being patient and loving and with just getting up every morning and doing what needs to be done even if I’m not in the mood, I love a Jesus who struggled with these things too.
Already I’ve had to do this for close to twice as long as he did. Sometimes, weary of the judging God who still predominates in my head, I like to think of Jesus as my mate, my brother, standing alongside me in my struggles and saying, ‘You know what Clare? You’re doing okay’.