What does it feel like to be Jesus?
So many science-fiction and fantasy works have stories of transformation and transcendence. Luke Skywalker leaves his life of a backcountry farmer and learns to commune with the fundamental forces – err, Force – of the universe. Harry Potter enters a world of wonder and whimsy where he’s celebrated as the Boy who Lived and learns to conjure, fly a broomstick, and fling things about with a flick of his wand. Neo goes from a workaday programmer to the One, with superhuman speed and flight, able to warp reality and stop bullets with a wave of his hand. Eragon leaves his life of a backcountry farmer, gains a mystical link with a dragon, and is imbued with the strength, speed, and insight of an elf. Saitama, an unremarkable Japanese salaryman, takes up a training regimen that results in him being the strongest hero in the world, able to defeat any enemy with a single punch.
To some extent, this is simply the hero’s journey, as described by Joseph Campbell: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” But these heroes’ supernatural abilities and transcendence of human limitations goes beyond the deep resonance within humanity’s myths and tales that Campbell identified. There’s an element of power fantasy and wish fulfillment there: we viewers and readers wish that we could escape our frailty and mortality and the confines of daily life and, perhaps, be Chosen Ones ourselves. We can’t, so we at least read about others who can.
Stories of the inverse are much less common: protagonists who undergo reverse transcendence, who are transformed into something radically less than what they were. If I listed every hero’s-journey ascension I can think of, I’d lose my less geeky readers before I’m a third of the way through. But listing every story of the inverse? There’s Regarding Henry and The Father and, umm, I’m not sure what else. These stories seem rare; they’re more melodramatic than heroic; they certainly aren’t wish fulfillment.
What did it feel like when Jesus performed his inverse transcendence, when he “emptied himself” (Phil. 2:7)? After all, “Let there be light” is far more impressive than “Wingardium leviosa”; freeing a nation from slavery and bringing judgment on their captors’ gods “with a strong hand and an outstretched arm” (Ps 136:11) is surely harder than stopping bullets with the same. “Announcing the end from the beginning and revealing beforehand what has not yet occurred” (Isa. 46:9) is greater than Ministry of Magic prophecies and always-in-motion Dagobah dream sequences. Saitama may defeat a leviathan with a single blow, but God simply creates one and watches it frolic. Poets and religious imagination wax lyrical about the wonders of Heaven; Jesus gave that up to become a first century Palestinian. The divine Wisdom and Word had to say, “I don’t know.” Hands through which galaxies were formed learned how to hold a hammer for first-century carpentry. Jesus went from invincibility to sickness, soreness, fatigue, cuts. Did it feel like an amputation, like losing one of your senses, like waking up and finding that half your mind no longer works? As wish fulfillment, as a hero’s journey, it’s rather poor stuff.
Stories of diminishment, of the protagonist’s voluntary transformation into lesser, aren’t common. However, many of us have experienced a lesser form in everyday life: parenting. Erudite teachers and eloquent speakers start cooing and speaking nursery rhymes, their voices instinctively adopting the high-pitched sing-song tones that science has confirmed babies can more easily pay attention to. Parents’ social circles and hobbies shrink as raising a family as the new little ones in their house become the priority. First-run movies and prestige TV are replaced with “Blue’s Clues” and “Bluey”; serious literature and sci-fi/fantasy epics give way to Eric Carle and Mo Willems. Runners and drivers and pilots get down on the floor with their babies who can’t even crawl.
After centuries of working to relate to his people through fire, cloud, tablet, dream, and prophets, God got down on the floor of first-century Palestine.
Jesus spoke of his crucifixion and resurrection as “being glorified.” And he was: the resurrection was his vindication, God’s proof that Jesus is who he says he is, that his Roman and Jewish opponents were wrong, that the two great enemies of sin and death are conquered. When Jesus stood up out of the grave, he stood up off the floor. In his post-resurrection appearances, he seemed to no longer belong strictly to this world: distance, space, and locked doors were no real obstacle, and it was curiously difficult for his still-mortal friends to recognize and get a handle on him. Yet he still walked and talked; he ate fresh fish on a Galilean beach; he was still restricted to one place at a time. (And this was, perhaps, the point of the Ascension. Philip Yancey: “The law and the prophets had focused like a beam of light on the One who was to come, and now that light, as if hitting a prism, would fracture and shoot out in a human spectrum of waves and colors…What Jesus brought to a few—healing, grace, the good-news message of God’s love—the church can now bring to all… ‘Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies,” he had explained earlier, “it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.’ Propagation by the dandelion method.” 1) Jesus still carried nail-scars and a spear-hole.
I’ve often subconsciously assumed that the Incarnation was in some way temporary – that, once his work on earth was done, Jesus got to go back to Heaven and go back to being just God. However, Acts 1:11 says that Jesus “will come back in the same way you saw him go into heaven.” Taken literally, this means that he will return in the flesh: in a Mediterranean antiquity body with nail-scars and an appetite for fish. John says that “we will be like him” (1 Jn 3:2), and – praise God – we do have the hope that we will one day, like Christ, rise from the grave and be free of the great loss of the death and the thousands of lesser losses as sin and mortality weigh on and wear away at our health and happiness and wholeness. But does saying we will be like him imply that he will remain in some way like us? After all, the new heavens and new earth will be more glorious than we can imagine, but none of us expect to weave galaxies, speak light, or gain omniscience or omnipresence.
And where does this language of “getting to” go back to Heaven and just be God come from? It’s far too human. After all, Jesus, “though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped” (Phil. 2:6). “Though” is not in the Greek, so this is perhaps better understood as “because he existed in the form of God he did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped” – because the nature of God is to give of himself out of love for others. To think otherwise, to think that gaining power and glory are automatically good, is just a hero’s-journey wish fulfillment again.
Jesus “is not ashamed to call [us] brothers and sisters” (Heb. 2:11). It may well be that Jesus continues to limit himself for all eternity, for the sake of getting down on the floor and fellowshipping with us.
Footnotes
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The Jesus I Never Knew, p. 228-229, Kindle edition ↩