“Who Do You Say That I Am?”

 

And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years and in divine and human favor.

The really last words of Luke’s story of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth before the adult Jesus starts his career as an itinerant preacher. That's the part we never think about.  We’re more inclined toward the Greek idea expressed in The Cherry Tree Carol, where Jesus not only commands the cherry tree from Mary’s womb, but converses with Joseph, as well. Jesus is God, right? How can God be a child, or need formation? The kind of formation children go through? And yet Luke makes it clear Jesus is fully human; an idea the non-canonical gospels run with in telling stories of Jesus’, and the mischief he creates with his power to perform miracles.

That’s the separating factor in Luke, too. Matthew focuses on Joseph in his nativity: the husband, the patriarch. Mary is silent, the infant almost invisible. Luke’s narrative foregrounds Elizabeth after the embarrassment of Zechariah, and focuses on Mary. Joseph is the silent, almost invisible, one. The angels direct the shepherds to the child in the feeding trough, wrapped in the rags of a poor person’s child. And then they take the baby to the temple, and finally we see him teaching the elders. Luke has marked the baby as God from conception; he proves it by showing him teaching about scriptures he can’t himself have learned yet. (For Mark Jesus’ baptism by John is the point where he becomes the Christ, the Anointed One. For John, Jesus exists in the beginning with God. His incarnation is just another of God’s semeia, or signs.) The most human thing Jesus does in John’s gospel is weep over the news of Lazarus’ death. In Luke’s gospel he sweats blood in the garden of Gethsemane. In the infancy gospels, he behaves as a child with god-like powers would behave. In that way he increases in wisdom and, at least, human favor.

The gospels each, in their own way, are at pains to make Jesus human, but also something more. Again, this is not a theological argument or apologia. It’s more a literary analysis; I’m just looking at the texts and how each gospel handles the issue. Humanity and divinity are pretty much oil and water. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the very presence of God in creation leads to theophany: Moses in Sinai in a thunderstorm; or the appearance of God to Elijah. It isn’t referenced in Luke, but when the priest entered the inner sanctum of the temple, where God might be directly encountered, he did so with a rope tied to his ankle, so the corpse could be safely removed. Moses came down from Sinai with his face shining, having stood so long in the glory of God (a glory that obscures God from human sight in Isaiah’s vision of the throne room of God). Zechariah comes out unable to speak; so the people know something big has happened.

God is not, in other words, human. God is wholly Other. So what is Jesus?

Mark identifies Jesus with God at the Transfiguration, a private event (only three disciples see it) which is the public revelation of Jesus as divine, a divinity that seems to come to him at his baptism, where he publicly acknowledges his earthly ministry and all that will involve. That’s actually pushing it backwards into Jesus’ life, since Paul places Jesus’ divinity in the resurrection. Matthew pushes it back to birth; Luke to pre-birth (it predates the conception of his cousin, John), and John’s gospel takes it all the way back to “in the beginning.”

But the Greek idea of humanity and divinity is basically jerks with superpowers. Which is kind of the lane explored by the infancy gospels. Jesus has to learn to be human, while at the same time being God. Luke says that happened easily. The infancy gospels say: let’s think about that a minute. Which is not to say they get something fundamentally right; but they do raise an interesting issue.