Commenting
on the humanity that Jesus shared with us,, Eastern Orthodox scholar Patrick
Henry Reardon wrote:
. . . in the New Testament one finds no
impulse to treat Jesus as an “exceptional” man, as the world understands such a
one: a heroic figure who rises above his contemporaries to answer the call of
destiny. Such a man is different from
other men.
Jesus is treated, rather, as one of us. This narrative treatment is
very different from the way their contemporaries regarded Caesar, Alexander the
Great, and other “exceptional” men. Such figures were not usually thought of as
mere members of the human race; they were not normally called “brothers” to the
rest of humanity. They were, on the contrary, the viri illustres et clarissimi. Although Plutarch’s Lives of famous Greeks and Romans was a
work roughly contemporary with the composition of the Gospels, its sundry
biographies bear not the slightest resemblance to the Gospels.
In fact, Jesus discouraged men from thinking
about Him in that way. He even manifested a reluctance to be called the Messiah
(cf. Mark 8:29-30), inasmuch as that term had come to signify military and
political ascendancy. Moreover, He deliberately assumed the role of a servant
among those who followed Him (John13:4), precisely to discourage them from
imitating the “rulers over the Gentiles” (Mark 10:42).
The biblical emphasis on the “common” quality
of the Lord’s humanity, on the other hand, indicated more than an ethical preference
on His part. His complete solidarity with the rest of the human race was a
condition, rather of His ability to redeem
the human race. Such was the force, I believe, of the reference to Jesus as “becoming
(genomenos) from a woman” in Paul’s
account of the Son’s coming “to redeem
those under the law” (Gal. 4:4-5).
This solidarity of God’s Son with our
humanity, in order to redeem humanity, gives structure to the argument made in
the Epistle to the Hebrews:
Inasmuch then as the children have partaken f
flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He
might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and release
those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. (2:14-15)
This biological and historical solidarity
with the rest of humanity is what prompts the author of Hebrews to speak of
Jesus as our “brother”: “He is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying, ‘I
will declare Your name to my brethren’” (2:11).
Our Lord’s oneness with mankind, however, is
more than biological. He is not called a “brother” simply as the rest of us
might bear that title. On the contrary, He has identified himself with human
beings in the special sense of becoming their historical representative, their
truly definitive spokesman: “Go to My brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending
to My Father and your Father, My God and your God’” (John 20:17).
Indeed, in the Gospel of Matthew this special
sense of Jesus’ “brotherhood” pertains directly to eschatology. At the end of
history, all human beings—“all the nations” (25:32)—will be judged on the basis
of their brotherhood with Jesus: “Amen, I say to you, whatever you did to one
of the least of these My brethren, you did to Me” (25:40).
This was an extraordinary claim for any human
being—the claim to be the final arbiter of history—and on the basis of His
having lived as a participant within history. Clearly, the early Christians
appreciated the uniqueness of that claim. St. Paul announced that God "has
appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom
he has appointed” (Acts 17:31). He was equally clear on the point in his
epistles: “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ” (2 Cor.
5:10).
In summary, early Christian thinkers, even as
they portrayed the humanity of God’s Word as individual and personal, likewise
stressed that it was of the very nature shared with all other human beings. The
Word’s oneness with the human race was regarded as the condition of His ability
to redeem the human race. In addition, the Lord’s shared humanity provided the
criterion for the final evaluation of human history itself. (Patrick Henry
Reardon, Reclaiming the Atonement: An
Orthodox Theology of Redemption, Volume 1: The Incarnation [Chesterton,
Ind.: Ancient Faith Publishing, 2015], 142-44)
