Too Big For Us To Understand

Friday after the Epiphany 2025

Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, was descended from King David, as Matthew’s Gospel tells us, but more fundamentally, He was a real human being, a real man, ultimately the offspring of Adam and Eve. Luke’s Gospel, in the third chapter, takes us all the way back there to the creation of humans.

Why is the true humanity of Jesus important? Even back in the first century, maybe thirty or forty years after Jesus’s Resurrection when St. Luke was penning this account, there were unbelievers who taught that Jesus was divine, but just appeared to be human, and others who taught that Jesus was just a man, given some superhuman powers. There are still folks like that today, and some of them have huge followings. The Church Fathers, all the way back into the first century, understood why those heresies caught on, and still have adherents today: Our minds, weakened by original sin, can’t wrap themselves around the full truth–Jesus Christ was truly God and truly man, and that’s why His death and Resurrection were able to save us from sin and death. He was human, so His sacrifice was that of all humanity. He was divine, so His sacrifice could make atonement for the infinite insult of our sins. When we, in faith, are baptized into Christ, we are immersed in Christ, as St. Paul taught, and thus baptized into His sacrificial death and resurrected Life.

The sacrificial love of God, shown in His Son, Jesus, is just too big for us to fully understand.

So John, in his first letter, ties together all these elements of our faith in Christ. We can overcome the world and its contagious, lethal sin. How? We must believe that Jesus is the Son of God, fully divine and fully human. He came in water and in blood, not only sacramentally or spiritually but also corporally, in a human body with a human soul. The Holy Spirit formed the sacred humanity of Jesus by acting on the matter in the ovaries of the Virgin Mary, just as that same Spirit formed creation by His power in the original Creation story. Spirit, water, and blood are in perfect conformity, true agreement. God the Father witnessed to the Truth of His Son at His baptism in the Jordan, and on the Mount of Transfiguration. John was there both times. The testimony is thus confirmed, and we can know it in our hearts.

I think this is one of the reasons Jesus, in His compassion for us mentally and spiritually wounded humans, used His Sacred Body in His ministry, and used material things in His contact with men and women. Once or more He even used His own spittle in a healing. He touched this man who was “full of leprosy.” Look at that word. In the Bible, “full” is a loaded word. This man had this horrible, smelly skin condition all over every square centimeter of his body. And, as you may know, Hanson’s disease affects the internal organs as well. The man was near death. Jesus was his only hope for relief. Jesus reached out His hand and touched him on one of the sores and spoke the healing words “I will, be clean” to the man’s word of faith. And the leper was instantly healed, in and out. Of course, despite Jesus’s warning to all the witnesses to be quiet about the healing, word spread throughout the area. Great multitudes gathered—note it—both to hear God’s word and to be healed of their sin and disease.

It's estimated that most human disease, even in the twenty-first century, is never cured. Doctors and medicines merely mask or alleviate symptoms. And for the diseases of the soul, they have no cure. That’s why alcoholism and drug abuse abound. So we must continue to look to the mercy of Christ for true healing of body, mind and spirit, always.