Hebrews 2:10-18
On Christmas Eve,
we remember and we contemplate Jesus as a newborn baby, held by his mother or all
wrapped up and asleep. It’s
heartwarming. Then this Sunday we come
to a verse like Hebrews 2:17 that says,
“He had to
become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a
merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God; to make a sacrifice of
atonement for the sins of the people.”
It seems almost blasphemous, and to many people it is exactly
that, to say that Jesus would be “like his brothers and sisters [that
would be us – you and me] in every respect”. That sweet little Jesus boy, born in a
manger; that sweet little, holy child – what happened when he hit the terrible
twos? Did he ever refuse to go to bed
when he was four? Did he ever throw a tantrum? Luke does give us a story about when he was
twelve and his family went to Jerusalem.
He became engaged in debate with the teachers in the Temple and
completely ignored that his family had no idea where he was for three whole
days. Really? Three days?
Luke 2:48 says that Mary asked him,
“Child, why
have you treated us like this?”
He was a real, human child.
He was not an adult in a child’s body.
He did not wear humanity like a costume.
There was nothing
static and finished about him. After
that incident in Jerusalem, Luke 2:52 says,
“Jesus
increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.”
He was like us. Really and
truly. Fully. There were things he had to learn, and he
learned them. If there’s any difference
between us, it’s the difference there is among all people as individuals – some
people make their mistakes and learn from them, some people have to do it two
or three times, and for some people the lessons just never sink in. Jesus was often weak, like us, he faced the
same challenges, but God was within him from the start, and he got them right. This whole family thing shows that. He may have hurt Mary and Joseph deeply when
he stayed in the Temple, but there is no suggestion that he ever failed to love
them.
It’s the failure
of love – first of all love for God, and after that love for God’s creation and
the people made in God’s image – that is the very definition of sin. And failure can mean not only the lack of
love, but love expressed in the wrong measure or the wrong fashion. It is tricky to be human. Jesus got it right, but faced all the
difficulties and temptations that we face.
Like us, he had to go through times of conflicting loyalties and make
choices.
That Temple he visited as a child remained an important part of
his spiritual life and he returned there as a man, not as a student anymore but
as a teacher himself. Some of what he
saw there disturbed him deeply, to the point where one day he lost it, and
started chasing out the moneychangers and overturning their tables. Have you never had those feelings about the Church? Have you never wanted simply to chase out
people you think may be using it as a vehicle for their own desire for wealth
or fame or control? (Confession time: there
are times when I see a church where the service is being led by somebody who has
to have a band for back-up and practices the lighting cues, and I feel the impulse
to run up front and start tossing the drums around and unplugging the amps. But I am not Jesus. I know that there’s no purity to my motives
and that part of it is jealousy and part of it is a sense that they’ve rejected
my own way of worship. In Jesus’ case,
it was true zeal for God that set him off.)
Or family, again:
When Jesus was dying on the cross, some of his family and some of his friends were
there.
“his mother,
and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple
whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your
son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here
is your mother.’ And from that hour the
disciple took her into his own home.” [John 19:25-27]
So, this is a demonstration of love offered even at the moment of
his torture and death, and of the love Jesus creates among his followers. I in no way mean to downplay that. My question, though, is where Jesus’ brother
James was. Wouldn’t it be up to him to
care for their mother? He became a
leader in the early Church in Jerusalem – it’s all right there in Acts and
Galatians – and one of his letters is even in the New Testament. What happened in the family that Jesus had to
assign guardianship to his friend John rather than to his own brother?
My entire point
in this isn’t to figure it out. My point
is that when we hear that Jesus “had to become like his brothers and sisters
in every respect” it means more than just that God took on our biology,
with all the limitations that entails, or that God entered into a philosophical
category that had previously been separate – that human and divine life came to
coexist in Jesus – but that in Jesus, in Jesus’ entire life and being, God was
working to engage all the messiest and most wounded parts of human lives, as
well as to lift up and sanctify all the most beautiful and good.
We cannot set
Jesus apart in a manger as if it were a box.
We cannot have just some idea of a loving, sentimental scene and say
that it fully pictures God’s love. God’s
love is a suffering love that leaves the manger for the cross. It is a love that recognizes the pain involved
in restoring broken lives – the addict who only comes back to health through
the pain of detox, the spouses who can only rebuild a marriage by addressing
the ways it has been torn apart, the abused child who can only survive by
asking someone for protection but has no words to do that. Jesus is a Savior in the midst of that,
because he does not stand apart from us in any way, but beside us and sometimes
in our place.
That love, in a
manger and on a cross, changes everything.
“Because he
himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being
tested.” [Hebrews 2:18]
He came to be one of us, and his death was a part of his
birth. There is no surprise in
that. But when his life and ours become
entwined, the meaning of birth and death themselves change, and the life that
lies between them as well as the life that lies beyond them become opened in
every way to the grace of God, because he is there in all of it.
“Once in
royal David’s city
Stood a
lowly cattle shed
Where a
mother laid her baby
With a
manger for a bed:
Mary,
loving mother mild,
Jesus
Christ her little child.
He came
down to earth from heaven
Who was God
and Lord of all,
And his
shelter was a stable,
And his
cradle was a stall.
With the
poor, the scorned, the lowly
Lived on earth
our Savior holy.
Jesus is
our childhood’s pattern.
Day by day,
like us, he grew;
He was little,
weak, and helpless,
Tears and
smiles like us he knew;
And he
feeleth for our sadness,
And he
shareth in our gladness.
And our
eyes at last shall see him,
Through his
own redeeming love;
For that
child so dear and gentle
Is our Lord
in heaven above;
And he
leads his children on
To the
place where he is gone.”
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