“Behold the Man!”
From the 19th chapter of the Gospel of John:
Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man!
† In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Perhaps Pontius Pilate, the intemperate Roman prefect of Judaea, wanted the Jewish Temple hierarchy to see how small and unthreatening the flogged Jesus was. Not being easily deluded, they immediately and anxiously demanded his execution so as to get him off the public stage where he was taking up entirely too much room. [That worked, right?] But let’s listen to Pilate and examine the Man Who would soon be judicially murdered with a wooden inscription bearing “King of the Jews” over his head.
The most significant thing is that Jesus is God become man.
He is NOT a man adopted by God and “filled with His Spirit”.
He is NOT a man that was fused with God in a divine surgery.
The Son of the Father, the Logos of God, the second Hypostasis of the Trinity—the Divine Person by whom everything was made—humbled Himself to descend into His creation and clothe himself with our nature. The Logos, at the instigation of the Father, by the power of the Holy Ghost, working through Mary (His greatest creation) took on a human soul, a human will, and a human body. God became man.
I want to speculate on some aspects of His biological development.
The hypostasis of the Logos, Who encompasses all of humanity, uniquely informed His developing body. No erroneous impulse was ever conducted down one of His nerves. As we all do, the child Jesus began ignorant, but His comprehension was unlimited. His ability to ascertain the truth was unerring. He never responded ineffectively or irresponsibly to any stimulus, deriving the maximum benefit possible from every instant of His existence.
(Aside: Being an inveterate reductionist, I do wonder what His Y chromosome looked like. I would like to see His sequenced genome, but I know that it could not have been in any way as remarkable as His realized humanity. After all, the Logos doesn’t just make everything; when it came to Himself, He made the most out of everything He had. But please note that this is not a unique situation for His humanity. We, too, are not our genes, which are simply a blueprint for our body. Rather, we are a conscious and intentional developer of ourselves. Recent psychology and neuroscience is recognizing this, even if the practitioners of those disciplines cannot identify what the “developer” of ourselves is.)
St. Luke tells us that when Jesus was 12 years of age he amazed the doctors of the Temple with His answers (and questions). Once the incarnate Logos was able to formulate His own questions, He would have quickly advanced past any merely human understanding of any discipline. He understood the Jewish scriptures (and frankly, anything He could read) better than any other man could. Jesus is the One Who sees the farthest, grasping not simply all the necessary implications of a situation, but also all of the possible implications that could reasonably be supposed. And He had infallible intuition about which of those possibilities would come to pass. So when I say that I believe that Jesus was “ignorant as all humans are” it was ignorance of a very peculiar sort.
I believe Jesus could be surprised under certain conditions. For instance, He wasn’t feigning ignorance of who touched him in the case of the woman with the 12-year “issue of blood”. Actions motivated by the Holy Spirit are inherently mysterious (John 3:8) so those moved by the Spirit (another Hypostasis) could “surprise” the other (non-Father) Hypostasis.
[Question for those wiser than I: Can God the Father be surprised by the Hypostases that are begotten or proceed by/from Him? My tentative conclusion is “no”.]
So actions motivated by the Holy Spirit can surprise the Son…but nothing that results from sin is surprising. Sin is all too drearily predictable, in a dull, mechanical way, with nothing of freedom about it. The travesty of the trial and crucifixion and its aftermath is completely apparent to Jesus. I think this is why he appears curiously un-engaged by the proceedings and neglects to answer many of Pilate’s questions. The whole tawdry episode has a fixed conclusion, completely foreseen, and the only interesting elements are supplied by the Protagonist.
It was around the ninth hour, three in the afternoon, that Jesus died. Was He killed? Yes and no. The crucifixion damaged His body, but He voluntarily “gave up” His Spirit, freely fulfilling His part of the drama.
I am convinced Jesus could not otherwise have died in the course of “nature”—of which He was the author. This, I think, is the principle reason Satan focused his attention on destroying Him since the demonic “kingdom” was profoundly threatened by the God-man coming to establish His reign as immortal Emperor of the Earth. I don’t think the cosmic archon suspected that Jesus planned to knock death as a weapon out of his hand. Neither did the devil envision the harrowing of hell.
To conclude, Jesus was the greatest of all men. There can be none greater. All excellence and perfection is found in Him. He is the embodied answer to all human questions. Beholding Him, one sees our hero, our Savior, our Lord, and our God. He died for the sake of all of us on a Friday afternoon, in Palestine, about 2000 years ago.
† In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.