JESUS' LIMITATIONS: A THREAT TO FAITH?

Many Christians imagine that the earthly Jesus was omnipotent and omniscient.  The New Testament decisively refutes this claim.  Prior to Jesus' baptism by John, Jesus is merely a humble carpenter from Nazareth.  His step-father Joseph apparently dies before Jesus' adult ministry.  Joseph figures in no story of the adult Jesus' ministry.  And at the cross, Jesus entrusts the care of His mother to the Beloved Disciple (John 19:25-27).  This would not happen if Joseph were alive to take care of his own wife!  Early Christian tradition rightly insists that Joseph is dead by then. 

Why dorsn't Jesus heal His earthly Dad and allow him to witness His ministry?  In my view, because He can't!  There is no credible evidence that Jesus performs any miracles prior to His receiving the Holy Spirit at His baptism.  After that, of course, He becomes an incredible healer.  Obviously the Holy Spirit makes the difference.  But why does Jesus need to receive the Holy Spirit if is walking around with a divine nature that makes Him omnipotent? 

The earthly Jesus is not omnipotent.  In His first messianic visit to Nazareth, He encounters venemous skepticism.  As a result, "HE COULD DO NO miracle there... (Mark 6:5)."  The plain sense of the Greek verb ("dynamai") is that He tried and failed.  Most commentators agree that a later scribe adds the awkward qualifying "except" clause, "except He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them."  The awkwardness of the contradiction "could do no" and "except, etc." gives away the later scribal gloss.  The scholarly consensus agrees that Matthew and Luke both employ Mark as one of their sources.  In copying Mark, Matthew seems to take offense at the implication of Jesus' temporary powerlessness and cleans up the problem by changing "could do no" to "did not do many."  Thus Matthew removes the embarrassing implication of apparent failure at Nazareth. 

In Mark 8:22-26 it takes Jesus two prayer sessions to heal the blind man at Bethsaida.  If He were omnipotent, He could do the job right the first time.  Who cares as long as He ultimately heals the guy?  Well, both Matthew and Luke care; they both take offense and omit the story from their Gospels.  Frankly, these embarrassing texts inspire rather than depress me.  They imply a willingness to tell how it really was, including apparent failures, and this adds credibility to the rest of the miracle stories. 

Our Gospels contain only one story about Jesus' life between His infancy and His baptism by John--the story of a precocious 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple during a Passover visit (Luke 2:41-52).  On the long walk home to Nazareth, Jesus deserts the crowd of villagers and remains in the Temple area to question the priests.  But like many absent-minded 12-year-olds, He fails to notify His parents.  When a distraught Mary tracks Him down, she gently reprimands Him for His inconsiderateness and Jesus replies, "Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?"  Luke appreciates Mary's anguish and concludes the story by saying, "And Jesus increased in wisdom...and in divine and human favor (2:52)."  How can Jesus increase in wisdom and divine favor unless there was a prior phase in which He was less wise and less in divine favor?  Hebrews 5:8 insists, "Though He was the Son, He learned obedience from the things he suffered."  Why would the author say this unless there was a period in wihch Jesus was disobedient or at least non-obedient? 

Why would Jesus feel the need for John's baptism of repentance (Mark 1:4) unless He felt the need to repent?  John's protest (Matthew 3:14-15) does not really answer this question.  Jesus' baptism is not merely cosmetic; it fulfills  "all righteousness."  Jesus' sense that He needs to repent is implied in His response to the rich young ruler: "Why do you call me good?  No one is good but God alone (Mark 10:17)."  The context shows that Jesus is not fishing for the ruler's affirmation of His divinity.  Rather, He is distinguishing Himself from God and implying that in the highest sense no one, not even He, is truly "good"!  Of course, what He means is that He is not God the Father. 

I am not denying the doctrine of the sinlessness of Christ.  The maturation of a child must not be equated with sin.  All of us, including Jesus, have to learn by trial and error.  Sin (Greek: "harmartia") is a  condition that separates us from God.  As long as Jesus remained one with the Father, He could make mistakes without being in a condition of sin.  Thus, the same Hebrews that implies this disobedient or nonobedient phase also portrays jesus as "one who was tested in every respect just as we are, yet without sin (4:15)." 

The bottom line is this: Jesus could not serve as our example if He did not share our limitations.  Thus, Hebrews characterizes Jesus' ministry as a whole, not just Gethsemane, this way: "In the days of His flesh He offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the One who was able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His godly reverence (5:7)."  Notice that He was heard because of His reverence, not because He was God's Son.  The "loud cries and tears" imply insecurity in the same way as Jesus' plea, "Father, everything is possible for you.  Please remove this cup from me (Mark 14:36)!"  We often forget this plea and prefer His ultimate compliance: "Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done."  We also tend to ignore the profound doubt implied by Jesus' anguished cry from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me (Mark 15:34-citing a psalm)."  The earthly Jesus was hardly omniscient.  For example, He admits ignorance as to exactly when He might come back again after His death (Mark 13:32).  These examples could be multiplied.

So how can Jesus' limitations be reconciled with His divinity?  The New Testament answer can be found in one of the earliest Christian hymns, a hymn that Paul quotes in Philippians 2:6-11.  The hymn begins, "who, though He was in the form of God (Gree: "morphe")..."  When it is used metaphorically, "morphe" means "same essential substance."  So literally the hymn begins, "who, though He was of the same essential substance as God, He did not regard equality with God a thing to cling to."  In other words, He  was willing to set aside His divine prerogatives to become human.  The hymn proceeds, "but He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant."  Emptied Himself of what?  Obviously of His divine nature (or better) His divine prerogatives.

So in a sense the earthly Jesus was exactly what God would be if God were merely human.  What does this do to the divinity of Christ?  The Philippian hymn concludes, "Therefore, God highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name that is above every other name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father."  The name above all names is "Lord", the name of divinity.  Jesus was restored to His divinity by His resurrection just as He preexisted as God.  With this difference: prior to His birth, the Second Person of the Trinity was not human, but rather the "Word of God" (Greek: "logos"--John 1:1,14). Here "logos" means "the rational self-expression of God" as opposed to God in His unknowability.  The Bible routinely qualifies its anthropomorphic imagery of God with the caveat that ultimately the reality of God transcends all personal categories.  But he anthropomorphic imagery serves as a tool that allows us to experience an intimate bonding with God.

Don      

I like what u've written Don. doing my own take, has nothing to do with you, so don't think that.

quote:The hymn proceeds, "but He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant."  Emptied Himself of what?  Obviously of His divine nature (or better) His divine prerogatives.
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awhile back I asked u in private do u think we humans can entertain angels unaware? I never really got a response from you but thought you were not ignoring the question, just considering it and of course I don't expect answers from anyone really. here in this post I get somewhat of an answer I can ponder, so thanks, but I want to do a take on it from my pov. when the hymn said he emtied himself taking the form of a servant, perhaps he emtied himself of ego aspirations, such as eat, drink and be merry aspirations. it was known he said to give away all that u own to the poor and follow him. not many can do that. we like our stuff. eventually have to give it up though. yet to say to be emptied of divine perogatives, perhaps we can liken this analogy to either duality (satan versus God) or we can look at the veil of forgetfulness the spiritualists first spoke of, as Monroe encountered with beings who were diving back into Earth had their memories erased for a new experience to undertake. I've no doubt Jesus was a human just like us. for most of us being in the flesh causes most of us to be attending always to fleshly concerns, the care and feeding of the vehicle, the survival of the organism. this leads to the acquistion of "stuff." to rememer divine perogatives, from whence we came, from whence we go is to make this world of items to pale by contrast. Jesus became a carpenter, but all the while he built things, he was building his perogatives, to say he was remembering himself, from whence he did come and his intentions here. are we not all builders of some item? back to my thought of angels we see not. I believe there is an angel inside of every man. in the old days some thought drifted about that there was good in every man. I believe the word good has its roots in the word God. I don't think others see their good inside of them so they need to be reminded it's there. we cannot be separated from the stuff we are made out of; God stuff. we can only enter a movie theater and become involved in the movie, but the movie ends and we return home. all movies end on temporary Earth spaceship. when I meet negative circumstances in those I encounter I ask to see their angel as I know it must be there. sooner or later the angel comes aknockin.' always in disguise, always grinning coyly to be discovered. love, alysia

Shawn, pf course, I understand Matthew 1:23 (citing Isaiah 7:14): "And He will be called Emanuel (meaning God is with us.)."  The question is what this means.  According to the Philippian hymn, it means that Jesus embodies what God would be like if He were merely human and no longer divine.  In that sense, Jesus IS divine.  The New Testament teaches that Jesus is restored to His divine prerogatives by His resurrection, prerogatives He exercised in His preexistent, pre-human phase. 

Jesus' earthly limitations are a function of His full humanity.  Without these limitations, He cuuld not legitimately serve as our example.  His admitted limitations in knowledge do not deprive us of the miinimal teaching we need, but do imply an ongoing need to develop our spiritual gifts and perhaps to even master astral exploration.  Jesus revealed the truth, but His truth was limited by His knowledge and therefore by the interpretive limitations of His culture.  From a Christian perspective, mastery of astral projection would be an extension of the gift of prophecy.

The problem with various views of biblical inspiration is not their correctness or incorrectness, but but the fact that they bypass the real issue--that biblical revelation is incomplete,  sufficiently incomplete to require fresh insight, revelation, and spiritual exploration.   That is why books like Howard Storm's "My Descent into Death" are important.  Jesus' NDE revelations to Storm confirm subtle aspects of His earthly teachiing, and yet, break important new ground as well. 

Alysia, it is important to speculate on the meaning of the phrase "He emptied Himself" (Philippians 2:7).  The phrasing of this sentence requires that "emptied" be understood in terms of the preliminary qualifying clause, "Though He was of the same essential substance as God." This contrast seems to imply that Christ emptied Himself either of this divine "substance" or nature or, at least, of its divine prerogatives.  But of course, you are entitled to your own interpretation.

The mystery of Christ's incarnation is related to the question of human destiny.  Christian baptism means that we "put on Christ" like a garment, and so, in some sense become mini-Christs.  By His incarnation, Christ incorporates humanity into divinity.  This fusion becomes permanent through His resurrection.  In a sense, Jesus creates an analogy between His own divinity and our status as "gods" (John 10:34-36).  This analogy implicitly interprets the sense in which humanity is created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27).  Thus, the analogy presupposes our ultimately destiny "to participate in the divine nature (2 Peter 1;4)."

The real danger in interpreting these mysteries is not metaphysical but moral or spiritual.  Our cultivation of pure unconditional love requires a humility that is inevitably undermined by the premature deification of humanity.  For example, ego remains ensconced on the throne of our hearts if we deem it just as valid to pray to our higher self as to pray to God.  Egolessness oir true humility requires a love that gives credit to God as wholly other and takes no credit for personal achievements that are best celebrated as divine gifts of grace.  As the Bible often reminds us: "God resists the proud, but givss grace to the humble (e.g. 1 Peter 5:5)."

Don

Beserk i think that verse means Jesus humbled himself
prety much. Intersting view on things though. Whehter or not he wants us to astral project i dont know, about that for it can leave on open to demonic influence.