No, the cleansing "precious flow" was his real human blood!
Last Sunday I found myself thinking about the flip-side of a worship song. As our church belted out “What a powerful name it is, the name of Jesus,” I thought about how the name Jesus was completely common at the time. There was nothing special or unique about it.
Jesus was ordinary.
The early church fathers wrestled with how this could be true and decided that it must be: Jesus was completely human and Jesus was God.
These days, it is contemplating the humanity of Jesus that heals me. When I take the time to imaginatively look into the eyes of Christ, and there, to allow the compassion and love and solidarity of God being human to touch me, I find comfort.
Everything about my humanness becomes holy when I look at Jesus and remember that God embraced every part of it too.
It’s like a baptism of all things.
Are you weak, dependent, selfish, ashamed, jealous, forgotten, ordinary, bored, tempted, doubting, angry, mocked, lonely, anxious, desperate, tortured, suffering and dying?
God, too.
And I think that is powerful.
The (Un) Powerful Jesus - spoken word:
Click here to listen: Download The (Un) Powerful Jesus
The (Un) Powerful Jesus - text
Please,
Tell me about the human Jesus,
the nursing newborn,
weak and dependent
on his birth parents.
Tell me about the selfish Jesus,
the misbehaved boy, the unruly child, the storyteller,
scolded and scoffed at and scorned.
Please,
Tell me about the jealous Jesus,
the coming-of-age Jesus
who waited and ached
for his time to speak
in the temple to come.
Tell me about the forgotten Jesus,
all
those
years
of which nothing was written.
Tell me about the ordinary Jesus,
stuck in monotony,
heavy-eyed and bored of it all.
Please,
Tell me about the tempted Jesus,
the doubter of Love, of belonging, of place.
Speak of the man who felt his own hunger
and faced the seduction of power.
Tell me about the angry Jesus,
ranting again, causing a scene,
flipping tables and mocked
for such a display.
Please,
Tell me about the lonely Jesus,
whose friends didn’t get it,
no matter how many ways
he found to say it again.
Tell me about the desperate Jesus,
weeping in the garden and pleading
with God to spare him
-to find another way.
Tell me about the anxious Jesus,
the frantic son making post-death provisions for his mother
to go on living in the world without him.
Please,
tell me about the despairing Jesus,
the tortured one,
the innocent sufferer of the world’s injustice,
dying in darkness.
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