The Young Messiah

"And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man" (Luke 2:52)

I watched the movie Young Messiah last night and was not disappointed by a powerful fictional story of Jesus at age nine and his developing awareness of life and his identity.  The movie was beautifully directed based off of Anne Rice novel.  We typically either focus on Jesus humanity or Jesus divinity and this movie tried to do both justice.  Jesus is not just fully God and fully man but I could not help watch this movie and think of Jesus as truly man and truly God.

If the world today and other religions simply want to view Jesus as only a man downplaying or denying his divine origin and nature, so the church has the gnostic and docetic tendency to downplay Jesus humanity.  In this movie, Jesus the boy gets scared, he doesn't fully understand his identity or purpose and he even gets sick like everyone else.  The paradox for Christians is to think of Jesus as fully human but never sins as Scripture teaches but then takes it even further that Jesus never has any doubts or is even tempted like we are which Scripture teaches he was tempted just like we are (Hebrews 2:18).

The hard question or new set of questions that Christians need to  start thinking about is how is Jesus fully or truly human like we are?  Could Jesus make a mistake and yet not sin?  Did Jesus ever forget someone's name or forget an appointment?  Did Jesus every oversleep or get moody?  Could Jesus enjoyed practical jokes too much or ever win a bet?  Maybe even harder questions is did Jesus ever get drunk or ever have a non-righteous anger moment?  For some of us, we don't want a superman Jesus who is so other that we can not relate with him.  We want Jesus the down to earth Messiah who is like us and one of us.