At the centre of the Christian faith is the belief that by coming to earth as one of us, Christ could die for our sins, rise to new life, bring us into fellowship with him, and begin the process of putting right all that is gone wrong. But at the centre of that centre, tucked away where we don't always see it, is the idea that to become one of us, Jesus had to become flesh. To become a human person, he needed to become a human body. In John 1: 14 we read The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
He didn’t just pop a body on for a season like Canberrans don puffer jackets for winter. Theoretically he could have done that, I suppose – just appeared one day as a 30-year-old male prepared to immediately gather his disciples, teach about God's Kingdom, and head to the cross. But to truly become human, Jesus needed to become an embryo, a foetus, a baby a the breast, a toddler who grazed his knees and cried for his mum and a teenager whose voice broke and had hair sprout up across his body. He needed to become a man. It wasn't enough to have a body. He needed to truly be one.
This was all too much, incidentally for many of the first hearers of the news about Jesus. In Ancient Greek thought the body was gross. In Plato’s teaching it was a prison you wanted to escape from so you could exist as pure soul.
So, when Paul, the great missionary of the New Testament, was in Athens preaching about Jesus and many of the philosophers of that city were so confused by the idea that they thought Paul was teaching about two gods, one named Jesus and the other called Resurrection (Acts 17).
In the first few centuries after Jesus was raised, a number of alternate explanations were produced to explain away the body problem for Jesus. They were grossed out by the humanness of Jesus and so they tried to smooth it over.
Perhaps Jesus only appeared to be human, or perhaps he was a divine mind in a human body.
The Christian pastors of the time were having none of it. Tertullian, who was a pastor from Carthage in modern day Tunisia, wrote this book called On The Flesh of Christ written about 205AD.
Tertullian spends a whole chapter laying out the physicality of Jesus. He wrote of the womb of Mary and the physical details of her pregnancy, with all of the accompanying bodily functions and fluids. He wrote about Mary - how she was expanding daily, heavy, hot in stuffy rooms, uneasy even in sleep, and my favourite description of the experience of pregnancy:
“... torn between the impulses of fastidious distaste, and those of excessive hunger”
Tertullian describes the normalcy of Jesus birth: He writes Mary's son was brought into the world together with the afterbirth. It’s not that he didn’t have more polite ways of describing the placenta but he was choosing to to be gritty and vivid in his writing. Talking about the goopiness associated with the birth of Jesus may sound coarse, inappropriate, or maybe even irreverent. Why would an early church pastor speak so crassly about Jesus?
Tertullian was convinced however, that if we distance ourselves from the earthiness of Jesus birth, then we also distance ourselves from his concrete humanity and therefore diminish the good news of Yahweh's coming in the son. Tertullian dwells on the messiness of Jesus birth to say to the gospel forgers, “why should we be embarrassed about the material world if Jesus wasn't?”
Sam Allberry in his excellent little book What God has to say about our Bodies notes:
Jesus incarnation is the highest compliment the human body has ever been paid. God not only thought our bodies up and enjoyed putting many billions of them together; he made one for himself. His body was for life. And for far more than that. After his death he was raised bodily. And after his resurrection he returned to his father in heaven, also bodily. When he ascended into heaven he didn't ditch his humanity like a space shuttle teaches its booster rockets. Becoming human at Christmas was not meant to be reversible. It was permanent.
There is now a human body made of the atoms of this universe at the right hand of God the father at the very centre of heaven.
Bodies matter. Jesus couldn't become a real human person without one. And we can't hope to enjoy authentic life without one either. That his body matters is proof that mine and yours do too. He became what he valued enough to redeem. He couldn't come for people without coming for their flesh and without coming as flesh.
grace and peace,
Steve