I’m thinking about bodies. About fingers, toes, skin, muscles, moving, sleeping, kissing. I have to write a short paper about Christology for school (good thing it has to be short!), and the facet I’m intrigued by is:
Jesus was a particular person.

Just like I am a particular person, but also not like me at all. He (unlike God, Jesus has a particular gender) might not like mangoes. We might’ve shared brown-eyed-ness, but our hair wouldn’t look the same. Our accents would be different for sure.

That’s what particularity is about. And embodiment, too… all the little things that go into being physical, “muscles better and nerves more.” Being in a body is a host of particular-ness, of which I become ever more aware the longer I use my body. My tendency to shin splints, exacerbated by a certain way I twist my body as I sleep. That I prefer to have no loose ends—hair out of my face, clothes streamlined against my frame, nothing to slow me down or (more likely) call my attention to it instead of whatever I’m focused on. How my tastebuds have never come around to bell peppers in any form, though I dutifully try them at least every half-decade.

Did infant Jesus sleep through the night, or was he (as we euphemistically say in my family) “busy”? Maybe as a little one he wentandwentandwentandwent until he dropped where he stood, like our B? He doesn’t strike me as one who would give the cut direct, as 5-month-old A once did. Did he play sportsball when chores were finished? We know he loved to study in school. The child shows the seeds of the adult—A does not trifle with people, B uses her “highly focused brain” to great effect in school, My Sweetie finds it almost as satisfying to put something back together as he does to cook a meal.

Think on this. Fully human, fully divine means not simply that Jesus was a part of the Trinity (divine), but that at the same time Jesus was completely, particularly, one individual person. Who didn’t walk far on Sabbath, and likely never tasted shrimp.

The unimaginable universality of God embodied within the sixty-kabillion imaginable specifics of one human.

I gotta think. What does that say about God? About being human… about being individually us?