Many deceivers have gone out into the world; they do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist. – 2 John 1:7
Do you think that Jesus ever got a scratch on his foot? I am sitting here looking at a scratch on my hand from my cat’s claw accidentally catching a bit of skin as it was running past me. It makes me reflect how much of the human experience is made up of minor injuries. Bruises, scrapes, scratches, cuts. Things that inevitably happen as you go through a day that might be a bit painful but are ultimately annoyances of daily life. That makes me wonder about Jesus walking all those miles in sandals. Surely he had a fair share of stubbed toes, bumping into stones and getting scraped up, and other small daily injuries. That’s part of being human. Yet so often we picture Jesus as impervious to the day-to-day realities of being human. Sure, he bled and died for us, but that was a grand gesture. Certainly his blood was human blood, but it was poured out just that once and specifically for us, right? And yet the claim of Jesus’ full humanity is just that –he experienced the fullness of being a person. He had annoying small injuries like cuts that caused him to bleed, not the forgiveness of our sins but simply because it sometimes hurts to be human.
Some people find this kind of reflection impious or inappropriate to their image of the perfect Jesus. Yet that is a temptation to the heresy of docetism. Docetism is the ancient teaching that Jesus seemed to others as if he were human, but in fact because he was fully divine his body was something like a hologram. It did not actually feel sensations. The word comes from the Greek word for “to seem,” pointing to the idea that Jesus’ humanity was not real but only seemed that way. There was a tendency for people wishing to follow Jesus to over-emphasize his divinity and lose the fullness of his humanity. Even in biblical times, 1 John and 2 John respond to a form of docetism. We do not find full-fledged docetism much anymore, but we can fall into creeping assumptions that Jesus did not truly experience the human struggles that we do. Yet it is precisely Jesus being fully in the flesh that makes it an incredible and life-giving claim that in him God is fully with us.