The divine human

It is very easy for us to get unbalanced in our view of Jesus. There are some who reckon he was just a decent guy who got up the noses of the authorities and was martyred. Which ignores Jesus’ own words claiming he was more than this.

Then there are others who are so concerned to defend the divinity of Jesus that he becomes a walking-talking deity who wasn’t really human at all. So his resistance to Satan, his weariness and pain, become artificial. Gods don’t suffer such things too badly.

The Jesus who hung on the cross may have been the divine Son of God, God in human expression, but he was yet a man. He suffered pain. And as our text reminds us, he was thirsty. It was probably warm if not hot. He was unprotected from the elements. Dehydration was likely setting in. So he naturally got thirsty.

This was no pretend man; this was no heavenly deity putting on some thin human façade. This was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, with fatigue, with thirst. Jesus had all the bodily needs and limitations we do. His body’s inner and outer workings were just like our own. He wasn’t some science-fiction construction that concealed divine machinery within an earthly covering.

We worship Jesus who was really and truly God and yet really and truly human. We worship the One who offered us living water and yet got thirsty himself.

Blessings
David Reay