If you Google “Was Jesus….?, you get back:
Was Jesus black, gay, real, Jewish, married, a carpenter, a socialist….all very shallow, surface questions.
It has been my experience that people shy away from examining the humanness of Jesus too closely. Maybe we are afraid of being sacrligious, considering he was also God and all. Or, maybe we don’t like to consider how many aspects of Jesus were remarkably like us.
I have heard people get angry when asked if they thought Jesus might have suffered from the teen plague of acne.
Really trivial, but if one travels down this line of thought very long, youn can reach some questions that appear alot more important.
For example, if Jesus was indeed fully human, could he have suffered from a human issue like a brain chemical imbalance? Or, do we assume he was born with a healrhy brain just because he was God? And if he did have an unhealthy brain as most humans have for at least some periods in their lives, what free choice did he have in making right decisions, and how then are we to relate to God when we are supposed to be like Jesus yet our brains may not be working right?
Another question that makes people uncomfortable….Jesus’ sexuality. We tend to approach the Jesus in the gospels in a neuter fashion, I think because we are afraid of highlighting Jesus with the belief that men “think about sex all the time. I don’t personally like thinking of him that way. However, I desperately wanr to belive that he was fully human as I am so that I know he really understands how I feel. Obviously I don’t believe Jesus ever acted on this portion of his humanity, or sinned in any way with regard to it. But,sometimes I wonder how much Jesus can really relate to each of us and our struggle to love well when he has never been intimate with anyone as in marriage? He has always had some measure of distance between himself and other people.
I don’t understand Jesus, or the mystery of being fully human and fully man, but I guess I’m not the first person with this problem. Still, I believe that “there is only Christ. He is everything.” Somehow in a way I can’t completely fathom, he made things right with God, and I am accepted by him just as I am, constant brain misfires and all.
