the incarnation and a relatable Jesus

Several years ago, while I was sharing a Bible story with my daughter, she interjected with an urgent thought: “I hope that Jesus knows that I have a pig.”

As I wrote in my journal at that time:

She’s been big on showing people her stuffed piggy recently: the movers, the plumber, anyone we’re Facetiming with, it doesn’t matter. So, it makes sense that if she got the chance to see Jesus, she’d want to show Him her pig, too.

[…]

I’ve been thinking about this all day, and I think that God would be interested in hearing about [her] piggy, as unimportant as it would seem to most believers. I think God cares about our problems, our feelings, our anything.

This conversation happened at a time when I was rethinking a lot of my own beliefs—and thinking about how I want to share them with my kid. Several conversations with kiddo during this time emphasized for me that I think Jesus needs to be a relatable god for Christianity to have value today. In fact, several months after the piggy conversation, as we were cutting out some paper puppets of Mary, Martha, and Jesus, kiddo proclaimed that “I don’t like Jesus very much” and that she preferred Mary and Martha “because they’re girls like me.” I’d already been on board with the importance of the divine feminine, but that certainly sold me.

Anyway, I thought of both of these stories when a friend recently wrote about one of his kids who asked earnestly after a bathroom accident whether that were an experience that Jesus could relate to. The dad’s answer was “probably, especially when he was a kid,” and that feels theologically valid to me. In fact, it reminded me of a passage I like from one of Catholic priest James Martin’s books (and one that I apparently already quoted just a few months ago):

A few years ago, a vicious stomach bug swept through our community. (When you live in a religious community and one person gets sick, it’s just a matter of time before everyone else does too.) And one night it hit me: I was the sickest I’ve ever been. In any event and without going into unnecessary details, when I was hunched with my face over the toilet for the fifth time that night, I had a strange thought: “Jesus did this.” Yes, Jesus, as indelicate as it may sound, threw up. He was a human being. In fact, he may have had even more severe physical problems than you or I do, since health and sanitation conditions were wretched in first-century Nazareth.

As I’ve also written before, I didn’t grow up learning the traditional Christian doctrine of the incarnation. In Mormon theology, Christ’s taking on mortal form is kind of checking a box on the way to eternal glory, and while there’s a certain beauty in that once you get into all the details, I’ve found that I much prefer the idea of a fully human and fully divine Jesus, not a fully divine Jesus “doing his time” in human form. I like it because even though I think a fully divine Jesus would still take interest in my daughter’s pig stuffy, and even though the incarnation doesn’t resolve all the answers about the divine feminine, the idea that God would set aside perfect divinity to come to earth, throw up, have accidents, and otherwise be present in this less-than-five-stars mortal reality that we all have to deal with makes Jesus relatable to me.

• parenting
• incarnation
• divine feminine
• James Martin
• stuffies