The Ordinary God
Luke 2:41-51; Phil 2:1-8 Dec 28, 2008
Intro:
What did Jesus do for the first 30 years of His life on earth?
We’ve just come through the season of Advent, the waiting and preparing, and then celebrating the birth of Jesus, the arrival of God in human flesh, the “incarnation” (to use the fancy theological term that sums up all that it means for the God of the Universe to take on human flesh, become completely human and live and walk around and experience all that it means to be human). We have read the story in Scripture. We have sung the story. We have given gifts, feasted, gathered with friends and family, all brought about by our desire to celebrate Christmas – the birth of Jesus.
But now the presents are all unwrapped. The feast is over, and the leftovers in the fridge are losing their appeal and are quickly headed for either the freezer or the garbage. The tree, with all its beauty and color, starts to feel more like a chore waiting to be done. We have the New Year’s celebration to look forward to this week, but then what? January. A return to “normal”. But does it really have to be that way?? Yes, actually, it does. The thing is to make sure that “normal” is actually Christlike.
Many of us don’t really like “normal”. “Ordinary” is an insult; it is like “average”. In a culture that worships stardom, that exalts “overachieving”, that loves the hero, that constantly seeks the triumph, that must always win, and where there is only one winner, no one wants to be “ordinary”. No one sets out to be in the middle of the bell curve. No one wants to be the “average”. Even in our spiritual lives, we sing the praises of radical transformation, we desire the miraculous, we want to hear the stories of exceptional and “supernatural” acts of God: we don’t hear very often about how a person grew up in church, gradually came to love Jesus more and more, has “kept their nose clean”, and is just daily trying to live in obedience to God. Those stories don’t get book deals or appearances on 100 Huntley Street. Because no one wants to be “average”, or “ordinary”. No one, except, strangely enough, God.
“Exiles”:
A couple weeks ago I started reading a book called “Exiles”, by Michael Frost. He tells the following story:
The great Spanish painter Bartolome Esteban Murillo was the youngest of fourteen children of a Sevillian barber, Gasper Esteban, and his wife, Maria Peres. in 1627, his father died, and a year later came the death of his mother. Because his elder sisters and brothers had already grown up and left home, the ten-year-old Bartolome was adopted into the family of his aunt, who was married to a wealthy Sevillian doctor. There he encountered a strict religious household and was often in conflict with his pious Catholic adoptive father. In pride of place in the sitting room of the doctor’s house hung a large picture entitled Jesus the Shepherd Boy. Murillo said that the picture dominated the family, and its depiction of the young boy Jesus was in keeping with the devout tenor of the household. Murillo, himself later known for his religious paintings that emphasized the peaceful, joyous aspects of spiritual life, claimed that the picture haunted him for most of his years with the doctor’s family.
The shepherd boy in the gilt frame stood bolt upright, straight and tall, his shepherd’s crook like a sentinel’s bayonet. Around his head beamed an obligatory halo. His eyes were lifeless, averted. His cheeks were rosy, and his complexion was unsullied. To the young Bartolome, nothing could be further form his vision of a young Judean shepherd boy. One day when his adoptive family was out of the house, he removed the picture from the wall and began to work on it with his paint set. The stern, unflinching face was given a lively grin. The eyes were enlivened with mischief. The halo was transformed into a battered straw hat, and the plastered down hair was now tousled and unruly. Jesus’ crook was turned into a gnarled walking stick, and the somewhat limp lamb at his feet was altered into a troublesome dog. (p. 28-29)
We can imagine what happened when the doctor returned home… We all, I think, have a tendency to paint in our imaginations a picture of Jesus more like the original painting than the altered one. We want our Jesus to be standing bolt upright, straight and tall, always clean, always polite, halo polished, complexion unsullied, every hair neatly in place. We want it in our manger scenes: clean hay, perfect white baby skin, “no crying he makes”. We don’t want a Jesus who is an “ordinary” boy, we want a perfect child who says “yes mum, I would love to do the dishes” without a word of disappointment or complaint. We don’t want a Jesus who falls down and bruises his face while learning to walk, who gets dirty playing in the mud and then exasperates his mom when he tracks the mud into the house, who ever struggles to learn how to read, who doesn’t like the taste of lamb liver but is forced to eat it anyway, who has sexual feelings as a young man, who accidentally smashes his finger with a hammer. We don’t really want a Jesus who is completely human. God couldn’t be that “ordinary”. But, really, what did Jesus do for the first 30 years of his life, if not experience all those “ordinary” things?
Luke 2:41-51
We have, in Scripture, only one story between the birth stories and the beginning of Jesus’ ministry around age 30. It comes from Luke 2:
41 Every year Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem for the Passover festival. 42 When Jesus was twelve years old, they attended the festival as usual. 43 After the celebration was over, they started home to Nazareth, but Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. His parents didn’t miss him at first, 44 because they assumed he was among the other travelers. But when he didn’t show up that evening, they started looking for him among their relatives and friends.
45 When they couldn’t find him, they went back to Jerusalem to search for him there. 46 Three days later they finally discovered him in the Temple, sitting among the religious teachers, listening to them and asking questions. 47 All who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.
48 His parents didn’t know what to think. “Son,” his mother said to him, “why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been frantic, searching for you everywhere.”
49 “But why did you need to search?” he asked. “Didn’t you know that I must be in my Father’s house?” 50 But they didn’t understand what he meant.
51 Then he returned to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. And his mother stored all these things in her heart. 52 Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and all the people.
There are two main narratives in this brief story – one that points out Jesus’ uniqueness, and one that points out his ordinariness. It is generally the uniqueness that we focus on – Jesus’ brilliance in his conversation with the religious teachers. It is verse 47: “All who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers”. We assume, from this, that Jesus blew their minds, that He had new and dynamic and fresh responses. But maybe the teachers were simply amazed that for a young boy, from out of town (the backwater town of Nazareth, no less), he got the questions right, and asked intelligent questions in response.
Regardless, the other narrative is perhaps even more prominent in the story. Jesus royally freaked his parents out. He went AWOL – for three days. I once lost my son for five minutes in the Old Strathcona farmer’s market, and I’ll never forget the terror I felt – this was three days! We have to recognize the vastly different time and culture and sense of community so that we don’t judge Mary and Joseph as incompetent parents and have them locked in jail for child abandonment, and as we do we also have to recognize that as a 12 year old, Jesus was responsible to stick with the group. He knew that after Passover it was time to go home, that is what his parents would expect. I’m sure they had even talked about it: “ok, tomorrow morning we are leaving for home…” Instead, and without asking permission, Jesus stays behind. “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been frantic, searching for you everywhere.” (vs. 48). This is not the picture of Jesus the shepherd boy whose halo is on straight; this is Jesus with the wild hair and lively grin.
Frost, who told the story of Murillo painting over the “perfect” Jesus, continues: “I fear that our highly sanitized, domesticated images of Jesus derive not from the New Testament, but from two millennia of romantic Christian art and culture. And I’d go further to suggest that the degree to which we adopt a tame and insipid picture of Jesus is the degree to which we avoid the mission to which he has called us.” (p. 29).
Phil 2:1-8
And what, pray tell, is that mission? Perhaps the Christmas story as told in Phil. 2 might answer that question. Paul writes,
“1 Is there any encouragement from belonging to Christ? Any comfort from his love? Any fellowship together in the Spirit? Are your hearts tender and compassionate? 2 Then make me truly happy by agreeing wholeheartedly with each other, loving one another, and working together with one mind and purpose.
3 Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. 4 Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too. 5 You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had.
6 Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to.
7 Instead, he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, 8 he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross.”
Beginning with the second half of the Scripture, let us first notice how God chose to become “ordinary”. Verse 7 makes it incredibly plain: “he gave up his divine privileges, he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being.” This is no “tame and insipid picture”; this is the most radical inversion of human wisdom imaginable: when God wanted to achieve the most significant act of power, He did it by first completely rejecting power and exaltation, and instead became a slave. The NIV translation of the first clause of verse seven says “he made himself nothing”. God became a helpless, human, dependant infant. Completely ordinary.
So what does this mean for us? This is the first half of the passage, whose message is summed up in verse 5. Paraphrased, it says simply: “be like Jesus”. It is fleshed out a little more, “love one another”, “work together with one mind and purpose”, “don’t be selfish, don’t try to impress others”, “be humble”, “think of others as better than yourselves”, “take an interest in others”. This is what it means to be like Jesus; this is the way we live when we have an understanding of a Jesus who was completely human, and could live this way. He demonstrated in His humanness that it is possible to love, to be united, to not live to impress others, to be humble, to take an interest. When we have a Jesus who is completely human, we have someone we can follow, not someone we can domesticate and keep at a distance, someone who is revered but not actually loved.
Conclusion:
When we emphasize the divinity of Jesus over His humanity, we end up with a plastic, tame, safe Jesus that we can understandably keep at a distance. If He is the perfect baby, the toddler who never says “no!”, the child who never exasperates His parents, the aloof young man who stays on the outskirts so that He might not be sullied by the roughness of real life; if Jesus is all that, we can keep Him at arms length. We can hang the un-offensive picture with the halo over the fireplace. We can safely say, “yes, but that was Jesus – he was God; surely I’m not expected to live like that too…”.
But if we have a Jesus who is completely human and completely divine, we face something completely different. We face a Jesus who says, “come and follow”. Who says, “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself. He does only what he sees the Father doing. Whatever the Father does, the Son also does.” (John 5:19). We encounter a man who says “there will be conflict; there will be scars; it won’t always feel nice; it won’t be comfortable or easy or luxurious; it will require sacrifice, change, danger, wildness… trust me, I know because I’ve lived this stuff,” and then, with a sparkle of life in His eyes, He says, “no matter how hard it might be, it will be worth it!”.
And for us, ultimately, this means living a life of profound and radical love for others. And I’m not talking about in a grand, Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. or Mother Theresa kind of way that everyone on the planet notices. I’m talking about in the ordinary, normal life you and I live in January. About in our families, becoming a slave like Jesus. In our school or workplace or leisure circles “thinking of others as better than ourselves”. In the neighbourhoods where we live, “taking an interest in others.” Ultimately, about working together to see God’s Kingdom come and His will be done. This is a high call, yet this is the mission to which we have been invited, by a man who lived it before commanding us to live it.
I’m going to let Paul have the last word this morning, I think he says it more powerfully than I:
“5 You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had. 6 Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. 7 Instead, he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, 8 he humbled himself in obedience to God.”
