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Jesus Christ's Humanity sermon ideas

According to the classical creeds, the second person of the Holy Trinity, at a moment in time, "became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was made human" (the Nicene Creed) "He is human from the essence of his mother, born in time; completely God, completely human" (the Athanasian Creed).

What does the Bible say about Jesus Christ's humanity?

Sermon ideas about Jesus Christ's humanity

Human needs

The incarnate second person of the Holy Trinity gets hungry, thirsty, weary, and sad. He prays. He weeps. He learns things as he grows. He is ignorant of the time of the Parousia. He is obedient. As Philip Yancey has remarked, Jesus prayed all night before calling the disciples, and then got Judas as one of his Father's answers to prayer, and kept him. Jesus is like the rest of us in every respect, except that he did not sin.

Of course, questions asrise. Wouldn't the second person of the Holy Trinity be omniscient? And so wouldn't Jesus, the incarnate second person of the Holy Trinity, have to be omniscient? But he wasn't. So are we saying of one person that he both was and wasn't omniscient?

If we were to say that, we would have not a mystery but a mess.

Theologically

So, theologically speaking, we have to make a judgment about our method of proceeding. Good theological method does not draw up a list of things a person must be to be divine, a similar list of things a person has to be in order to be human, compare the lists, judge them to be inconsistent (e.g., a divine person is omniscient, a human person is non-omniscient), and then rule out the incarnation on the basis of its logical inconsistency.

Instead, in classic theological method we note the Scriptural testimony that Jesus is both divine and human, and, on that basis, make adjustments in our understanding of what it is to be divine and human. So, in the present instance, we note that Jesus is divine and also non-omniscient and conclude that it is possible to be divine while also non-omniscient for a period of time. Then the relevant divine trait is "most-of-the-time omniscience" or "omniscient-except-when-incarnate." Perhaps, as Philippians 2:7 suggests, the self-emptying of the Son of God included some of his divine perquisites, such as omniscience.

In any case, the incarnation of the Son of God is a glorious honoring of our humanity. It's also the one thing under the sun that is really new. Imagine that exactly one person, Jesus Christ, is simultaneously the second person of the Holy Trinity and also a particular man who learned to cut boards in his step-father's carpenter shop and may have cut some of them too short.

In Mark 8, Jesus heals a blind man, but has to do it in two stages because he didn't get the job completely done in the first stage. Where blindness is concerned, God can do anything. Where blindness is concerned, a human being can't do anything. Where blindness is concerned the incarnate Son of God can pull it off, maybe, but it's very tricky, so he asks a half-eager, half-doubtful question: "Can you see anything?"

The incarnation of the eternal Son of God gives us a union of divinity and humanity so amazing that it demands our soul, our life, our all.

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