Seven Last Words: An Invitation to a Deeper Friendship with Jesus by James Martin

Seven Last Words: An Invitation to a Deeper Friendship with Jesus by James Martin

Author:James Martin [Martin, James]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-02-01T16:00:00+00:00


Jesus had a body.

Let me repeat: Jesus had a body.

Quite a few people have a difficult time accepting Jesus’s humanity. Now, I believe, as the church teaches, that Jesus was fully human and fully divine. But some of us focus almost exclusively on stories that seem to highlight his divine nature: the Son of God who went around healing the sick, raising people from the dead, stilling storms—all the kinds of miracles that people tend to associate with his divine power.1

In other words, some of us are tempted to believe that God was simply playacting at being human. Just pretending. Some of us say, “Well, he may have suffered on the cross, but for the rest of his life he was God, so he must have had it easier than the rest of us, right?” Or we say, “Well, technically he was human, but he was God, so he really didn’t have the same experiences I do, right?”

Let’s be clear again: Jesus was born, he lived, and he died. The child called Yeshua—his name in Aramaic—entered the world as helpless as any newborn and just as dependent on his parents. He needed to be nursed, held, fed, burped, and changed. As a boy growing up in the minuscule town of Nazareth—which archaeological research shows us had only two to four hundred people—Jesus would have skinned his knees on the rocky ground, bumped his head on doorways, and pricked his fingers on thorns. He would have gotten cuts and bruises like any child.

Jesus had a body like ours. That means he ate like us, drank like us, and slept like us. He went through puberty. As a human being, he would have experienced the normal sexual longings and urges. We know he was unmarried and celibate, but he would have, as a human being, felt all the normal sexual attractions and desires. Those are far from sinful, after all. He may even have fallen in love with a girl in Nazareth.

Jesus had a body. We know that Jesus got tired from time to time. In one Gospel passage he falls asleep in a boat on the Sea of Galilee.2 Jesus pulled muscles, got headaches, felt sick to his stomach, came down with the flu, and maybe even sprained an ankle or two.

A few years ago, a vicious stomach bug swept through our community. (When you live in a religious community and one person gets sick, it’s just a matter of time before everyone else does too.) And one night it hit me: I was the sickest I’ve ever been. In any event and without going into unnecessary details, when I was hunched with my face over the toilet for the fifth time that night, I had a strange thought: “Jesus did this.” Yes, Jesus, indelicate as it may sound, threw up. He was a human being. In fact, he may have had even more severe physical problems than you or I do, since health and sanitation conditions were wretched in first-century Nazareth.



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