On X, I saw a post in which a Jew wrote that Jesus was a charlatan. “Jesus being God on Earth made flesh? Nonsense. God is never supposed to be limited. Let alone die,” he wrote.
I was quite taken aback! Of course, I knew that Jews didn’t believe that Jesus was divine –obviously– or they’d be Christian. And I’d heard some explanations as to why the Jews of Jesus’s time didn’t believe he was the Messiah. For instance, a lot of Jews in His day expected a military Messiah that would throw off the shackles of their enemies, not wind up crucified at the hands of their enemies.
Seeing this post was the first time it occurred to me that, to the Jews, the Christian claim that God would choose to limit Himself in our human form might be an outrage. Or that it would be an absolute scandal that He would endure death at all, never mind such a horrible, torturous death. When I thought about it from that perspective I realized how ludicrous it might all seem.
It reminded me of how GK Chesterton wrote that we don’t properly appreciate how amazing the Christian faith is because we are too close to it. After over 2000 years, it’s embedded in our culture; we’re very used to it and it seems old hat to us. We end up saying things like “Jesus is the Son of God” and “Jesus died for my sins” without really thinking of the gravity of such phrases.
“God is never supposed to be limited. Let alone die.”
But that is what is so amazing about what He did for us, His little creatures. He chose to incarnate. He chose to limit himself in our human form and take on all of our weakness and poverty. And as if that wasn’t unbelievable enough, He then died for us. He was God, and so His was the only death that could make perfect restitution for our sins against Him. In doing so, He reopened the gates of heaven which had been closed by sin. Rising from the dead, He conquered death which none of us could do. Only God could do these things and He loves us so much that, despite the trouble it caused Him, He chose to do them.
He said He came to serve us, His little creatures who are infinitely below Him! He lived in poverty! He ate dinner with Zaccheus! He had a conversation with a Samaritan outcast! He washed the feet of fishermen! He cooked them breakfast after His resurrection! He paid taxes! He did as His mother asked Him! He let His betrayer kiss Him! In light of the fact that He is the almighty, all powerful, omnipotent God, these things are absurd! Performing miracles, healing people, and controlling the weather are all exactly what I would expect God to do. Spending his earthly time hanging out with a bunch of randos, not so much.
To us humans it is absurd. But we humans don’t think or act like God as He told us in Isaiah 55:9: “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” The absurdity of it all is what makes me believe that it is true because no human would be capable of inventing a person so incredulous as Jesus. There are no gods in any other religion like Him. The pagan gods did the things that humans would do if they had unlimited powers. They chased carnal pleasures. They did not weep over their rebellious people, take the world’s sin on their shoulders, get beaten nearly to death, mocked and then allowed themselves to die in the worst and most humiliating way to be executed, and all for the sake of us undeserving little creatures.
Christianity is an amazing religion that is unmatched in its distinctiveness. The fact that God broke into our world and spent 33 years with us as one of us is mind-blowing when one really thinks about it. Jesus is so incomparable as a religious figure that his very birth cleaved time in two. His teachings, so alien to the first hearers, radically changed the world. Sometimes it takes a Jewish dude on X claiming what Jesus did as “nonsense” to remind one to look at it afresh and to realize just how astonishingly sensical it really was.
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