Lectio divina theme: Jesus of Nazareth, the son of man

If God isn’t like Jesus, he ought to be.  –unknown

 Jesus is what God had to say.     

Come to Me… and keep coming;   we come to Jesus to let Jesus live his life through us, if he had our life to live, which he does.  –Bart Tarman

Jesus’ most common and almost exclusive self-name is “The Human One” or “A Son of Humanity” (‘son of man’).  He uses the term 79 times in the four Gospels. (perhaps only once admitted: son of God). Jesus’ reality, his cross, is to say a free “yes” to what his humanity daily asks of him…We are not human beings on a journey toward Spirit, we are already spiritual beings on a journey toward becoming fully human, which for some reason seems harder precisely because it is so ordinary.--R. Rohr

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, as He already existed in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied Himself by taking the form of a servant and being born in the likeness of men.And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death: death on a cross. – Paul to Philippian people; 2: 6-8     

How beautifully simple—the path of Jesus hidden right there in plain sight! While some Christians are still reluctant to think of Jesus as teaching a path (isn’t it enough simply to be the Son of God?), in fact, the Gospels themselves make clear that he is specifically inviting us to this journey and modeling how to do it. Once you see this, it’s the touchstone throughout all his teaching:  Let go! Don’t cling! Don’t hoard! Don’t assert your importance! Don’t fret. –R. Rohr

The answer is the Incarnation, for in this act God entered fully into our suffering. Pain was his lot in the slow ascent from a struggling, kicking embryo to an utterly dependent baby, through gangling, awkward adolescent to become a man—a “man of sorrows.” Through all, he was “acquainted with grief.” “In all our afflictions he was afflicted.” Yes, he understands. He cares like no other.--David Roper

The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.--Jn 1:14 —Through the incarnation, God in Jesus became flesh; God visibly moved in with the material world to help us overcome the illusion of separation. 

Behold, My Servant will prosper, He will be high and lifted up and greatly exalted.     Just as many were appalled at you, so His appearance was marred beyond that of a man, and His form beyond the sons of mankind.So He will sprinkle many nations, Kings will shut their mouths on account of Him; For what they had not been told, they will see, and what they had not heard, they will understand.

Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?For He grew up before Him like a tender shoot, And like a root out of dry ground;  He has no stately form or majesty that we would look at Him, nor an appearance that we would take pleasure in Him. He was despised and abandoned by men, a man of great sorrow and familiar with grief;  and like one from whom people hide their faces. He was despised, and we had no regard for Him.  ---Isaiah, 1000 years before Jesus 52: 13- 53: 2

The first Incarnation of God did not happen in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago. That is just when it became human (in Jesus of Nazareth) and personal for us, and many people started taking divine embodiment seriously. The initial Incarnation actually happened around 13.8 billion years ago with the “Big Bang.” That is what we call the moment when God decided to materialize and self-expose.  Christ is not Jesus’ last name; it’s the title for his life’s purpose. –R Rohr

Immanuel means God with us — the God who became just like you and me.

Whenever God wants to get a message across to mankind He does not merely send someone to announce it;  his final way of driving it home is to dress the message in flesh and blood. –Ray Stedman

The gospel story begins with Jesus’ family fleeing violence as political refugees, pushed around Palestine by the imperial forces of Caesar and Herod. The adult Jesus not only characterizes himself as homeless, but stateless.---C. Myers 

For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things just as we are, yet without sin.-Hebrews 4: 15

For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever the game he is playing with His creation, He has kept his own rules and played fair.  He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself.  He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death.  When He was a man, He played the man.  He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.--Dorothy Sayers

We have migrated to an entirely new universe, or, as Paul says, “a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17) in which old ideas of supremacy are subverted.      If this is true, to follow Jesus is to change one’s understanding of God. To accept Jesus and to accept the God Jesus loved is to become an atheist in relation to the Supreme Being of violent and dominating power. We are not demoting God to a lower, weaker level; we are rising to a higher and deeper understanding of God as pure light, with no shadow of violence, conquest, exclusion, hostility, or hate at all. We might say that 2000 yrs ago, Jesus inserted into the human imagination a radical new vision of God—non dominating, nonviolent, supreme in service, and self- giving. –B. Mclaren

Jesus is often referred to as the "new Adam" or "last Adam" because his life, death, and resurrection are seen as a reversal of Adam's fall and a source of new life and salvation for humanity.--AI  

—For since by a man death came, by a Man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.   ---Paul 1 cor. 15: 21-22

—Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all mankind, because all sinned…Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the violation committed by Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come. But the gracious gift is not like the offense. For if by the offense of the one the many died, much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many.  ---Paul,  Romans 5: 12-15