The Jesus Who Identifies with You.

I like Jesus.

Not so much because I identify with him but because he identifies with me.

He knows what it feels like to hold his pee.

He knows what it is like to eat a bad piece of fish.

I am not sure if it is possible to truly identify with his divinity unless I can identify with his humanity. If I miss his humanity there is no way I can truly appreciate his divinity. It seems that this is the way that God saw it. It’s hard to grasp the divinity of a God who lives in outer space somewhere not yet seen, so God becomes one of us—God identifies with us so that we can identify with God.

Perhaps another way of thinking about it is to say that God got in touch with our humanity so that we could get in touch with our divinity as those who are created in God’s image.

From a Sammy Super Christian perspective it easy to talk about Jesus who drinks grape juice and wears a cape and leaps tall mountains like a super hero but he was the human being who drank real wine and wore thorns instead.

It’s easy to forget that on the day he was baptized that he got in line with the rest of the folks who were waiting to repent of their sin and get dunked by John the Baptist. Jesus may have been tempted to skip the ritual or tempted to get “fronts” from the cute girl in the crowd but he didn’t. No he sat and waited, left with getting in touch with his experience of being human like the rest of the folks in the crowd. He would not have been human otherwise, and certainly not Divine.

Like me, he may have been tempted to scream at the religious fundamentalist, punch the greedy business man, kill the criminal, hate his enemy, and bomb all that he feared, but he didn’t. And yet, he knows exactly what is like to face the temptation of being fully human. I imagine as a carpenter he hit his thumb on occasions and because he was like me, he may have been tempted to scream, “@#$% that hurt!”

He identifies with me. He knows what its like to be thirsty, hungry, tired, frustrated and pissed-off. He knows what it is like to be slapped, made fun of an treated like an outsider who wasn’t welcomed.

He knows what its like to be tempted to say, “Forget it all” and go hide out in the mountains or party in Egypt for the rest of his life. He knows what it is like to feel alone, abandoned, isolated and afraid. He knows what it is like to cry out to God from the pit of his soul, “Why have you abandoned me?” He knows what its like to enjoy a great meal with some colorful folks. He knows what its like to break the religious laws and traditions set by people.

He knows what it is like to dance with prostitutes at parties.

He knows what it is like to love and be loved by his mother. He knows what its like to be hurt by a friend. He knows what it’s like to be hated by his peers for his ideas about God.

He identifies with me.

He identifies with you.

And if we want to see God and be touched by God, we cannot become like Jesus until we allow Jesus to become like us.