TOM GILSON — Christmas endures as the celebration of God coming to be one of us: fully God yet also fully human.

When Jesus came He entered a world like today’s in many ways: brutality was common, injustice was routine, idolatry was rampant, and wrong was often confused with right.  He overcame it all with His goodness, right to the very end, for as Hebrews 12:1-2 tells us, it was “for joy” that He “endured the cross, disregarding its shame,” and has now “taken His seat at the right hand of the throne of God.”

That same passage encourages us to look to Jesus and learn. I’ve been looking at His goodness a lot lately, trying to imagine being as purely loving and giving as He was with all His divine power. I can’t do it. It’s much too far a stretch. He was God, after all. I can only think on a human scale. Still I’ve learned some things through trying.

I’m going to invite you to try to imagine it in the same way. Here’s the scenario. You’re leading a conference for thousands of people. The power goes out all over your end of town, so there’s no way for food services to operate. Everyone is about to go hungry. You tell your staff, “Just go out to all the pizza shops where they have power. Get enough for everyone. Don’t worry about the cost. I’ll pay for it myself.”

I didn’t just make that up. I was there when something like it happened once, at a Campus Crusade for Christ staff conference at Colorado State University. There were about 5,000 of us meeting inside CSU’s basketball arena that morning when suddenly everything went dark and quiet. The outage affected most of the campus and a large portion of the city.

Our conference director turned to his team seated behind him and spoke two words: “Pizza! Go!” A whole row of staff ran out to the pay phones (that tells you how long ago this was), looked up all the pizzerias they could find, and began calling around to ask, “Do you have power, and how many pizzas can you get here by noon?”

The sum total of all the answers was, “Enough to feed the whole group.” I don’t think I’ll ever see another pizza party like it again!

The conference absorbed the costs of that lunch. The scenario I’m describing is different: we’re imagining you paying for all that pizza out of your own pocket. That would be a form of power in action: economic power. It would be nothing like the supernatural power Jesus used in the Feeding of the 5,000 (John 6:1-14), but it would still be a lot of power anyway. How rich would you have to be, to buy lunch for 5,000 people on the spur of the moment?

We’re not quite done imagining yet, though. Suppose you had the kind of money that could let you do that. What would the rest of your life look like? Picture it: what kind of home would you live in? What kind of car would you drive?

Now we we finally come to the question I’ve been driving at: with that kind of power, wouldn’t you use some of it for yourself — your car, your home, your clothes, your evenings out?

Jesus didn’t. Everything he said, everything he did, every miracle he performed was for the good of others. He had all the power of God, and never used it for himself.

He was tempted to — Satan tried to trick him into it after His 40 days in the wilderness — but he never did. What kind of home did He have?  He told a would-be follower he had “nowhere to lay His head.” (Luke 9:58) When He was nailed to the cross He could have called on legions of angels to protect Himself. (Matthew 26:53) He died for us instead.

Can you imagine being so giving? So self-sacrificing? So powerful, yet never using any of your power for your own benefit? I can’t.

Now, you might say Jesus had an unfair advantage: He was God, we’re just creatures. We’re the sort of creatures who can make wrong seem right and good seem bad; who turn marriage and morality upside down; who make the mother’s womb the most dangerous place for many babies to be; who turn rail stations and concert halls and social service centers into centers of human destruction. Those of us who aren’t so obviously destructive are at least self-centered, seeking our own purposes and our own benefit. This is what it’s like to be human.

But no — that’s what it’s like to be human when humanness is shrunken through sin. We’re less than God intended us to be. In a very real sense we’re less than fully human. Jesus showed us what it looked like to be fully human, to live the kind of life God intended: strong, giving, worshipful, true and always loving.

Others far less human than Jesus took offense and ended His human life — or so they thought. They were wrong, for He had joy in view all the time. In His humanity he died for us, and in His divine power He rose again, also for us. Now He reigns forever in the same form of resurrected and glorified body He’s promised to give those who trust and follow Him, when at last we, too, become fully human.

Adapted from an article originally published on Breakpoint.org: BreakPoint Columns, December 16, 2015.
Re-published with permission of  The Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview