In Vulnerability

How does Superman shave? Think about it. He's invulnerable to everything other than kryptonite. What could he use to shave his whiskers? Or cut his hair? Did Jor-El put some super razor blades into that little escape rocket with his infant son? Kryptonian scissors? I actually looked this up and there are some very funny answers on the internet but many remember a comic book where he uses his heat vision and a mirror to singe it off! As for how Clark and Lois could ever, uh, have kids, well, science fiction writer Larry Niven explored that insurmountable problem in hilarious detail. Suffice it to say, Superman only looks human; he's not really one of us.

There's been a lot of fan commentary on the idea that Superman, created by 2 Jewish teens, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, was a kind of Messiah. He saves the world, repeatedly. But he does so because he's physically more powerful than his enemies and impervious to bullets. It's precisely the kind of hero that would be dreamed up by a boy like Jerry Siegel whose father died as his business was being robbed by armed men.

Jesus is God Incarnate and many would be totally cool with it if he had been like a real-life Superman--superstrong and invulnerable. He'd never suffer the pain and humiliation of being crucified. He'd never be a victim. Of course, he's also never get a splinter or understand our pain or weaknesses. He would never understand how fear would make Peter deny him 3 times and then be able to forgive him. He would never understand how grief and bitter disappointment could make Thomas doubt. He would never know why Mary, Martha and their friends would be so brokenhearted over Lazarus' death and so weep himself.

At our last Lenten midweek service, we considered why it is important to hold onto the fact that Jesus is God. This week we emphasize the other fact of the paradox: that Jesus was also fully human. Why is this important? There was a whole philosophy called Gnosticism that felt Jesus' humanity was not just unimportant but a bad mistake. All matter was evil to them and that meant that anyone as pure as Jesus could not have really become a flesh and blood man. They often resorted to the idea that Jesus' corporeality was an illusion. This was called Docetism, from the Greek word for "seems." Jesus only seemed to have a body; he was, rest assured, pure spirit. 

As I said before, we tend to think in binary terms: black or white, flesh or spirit, this thing or that thing, and never the twain shall meet. The idea of God Incarnate makes many people uneasy. They want to say, "Jesus, pick a side already." But reality doesn't care for our categories. We separate mammals and birds, noses from bills, say reptiles can be poisonous but not mammals. And then reality throws a duck-billed platypus at us. We make our categories neat and clean and reality messes them up and blurs the lines. It turns out reality is just taking cues from its creator. He doesn't like us dictating to him what is acceptable in the divine.

God, according to the philosophers, is supposed to be aloof, passionless, a spirit who is primarily defined by what it isn't: immaterial, invisible, incomprehensible, implacable, immortal. Jesus breaks all those rules. He can be touched, seen, understood, and appealed to. He can be hurt. He can be tortured. He can be executed. He knows what it is to be human from your first breath to your last.

In his classic book, "Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?" Rabbi Kushner admits that Christians have an advantage in believing God became a man in Jesus. If God was one of us, it means evil is not abstract to him; it's not an intellectual problem; it is not an annoyance that dirties up his clean creation. It means it is something that he encounters everyday, in his life and the lives of those he loves. He sees the damage it does, hears the cries of its victims, feels their deformed limbs and ravaged skin, smells the coppery scent of the blood they shed, and tastes the poor fare they eat. Evil is what he masters and denounces: the evil people do deliberately, the evil people let happen, the evil of not wanting to know what happens, the evil of hypocrisy, the evil of deceit, the evil of violence, the evil of neglect. Evil is what he himself endures: the evil of betrayal, the evil of injustice, the evil of political convenience, calculation, and cowardice, the evil of just following orders.

Jesus also understands goodness, not as an abstract quality commended by philosophers but as a sign of God's grace. He sees it in the strong faith of men willing to tear up a roof to get their friend fixed. He hears it when the scribe quotes the 2 great commandments to him in response to his question. He feels it in the children thrust into his arms by their parents for his blessing. He smells it in the last Passover meal he shares with its friends. He tastes it in the wine provided by the women of Jerusalem for those condemned to the cross. He models and encourages the goodness of justice, of mercy, of peace, of faith, of hope, the goodness of self-sacrificial love.  

People sometimes have trouble with the divinity of Christ. It seems a vague, unnecessary quality to some. But in Jesus the human and divine meet. In his humanity, his divinity is concretely expressed. In Jesus we see what God is like. And because he is the perfect image of God, we see what we are intended to be and what, through Christ, we can be. He came to humanity so we can share in his divine life. And so we can spread his eternal life to others. But God is love and none of us alone can fully mirror that. But a whole world, loving God with all they are and each other as Christ loved them, can display the true nature of the God who so loved the world that he sent his unique son into it so all may know, trust and live that love.