God is a mystery. That almost goes without saying since anything we can comprehend can’t be God. Humanity is also a mystery. One of the few things we truly know about ourselves is that we don’t know ourselves or our natures very well. When we celebrate the birth of Jesus, the time God entered humanity, we have the mystery of mysteries to the zillionth power.

The notion that God would become a human being boggles the mind and is hard to believe. It is often suggested that modern people can’t believe it because the idea is out of date. Actually, it was hard to believe in Jesus’ time and in the early Christian centuries as well. Joseph himself had a hard time believing it.

Because of this difficulty in believing, there were thinkers who suggested that God pretended to be a human being and Jesus was some sort of phantom who looked like a human but wasn’t. Open Jesus up and, instead of the electronic wiring of an automaton, you see a blinding ray of divinity. In one of the infancy stories that were not included in the canonical Gospels, the little boy Jesus climbs up sunbeams as if they were a jungle gym. His playmates try to follow him up into the sky but they fall and Jesus has to bring them back to life to keep out of trouble with his mother.

Another variation on this unbelief is the notion that Jesus was just a human being who at some time or other became possessed by the divinity, sort of like someone being possessed by a demon who overtakes a person, only this time it is God who did the possessing so he didn’t hurt Jesus in doing that. This is a little like an episode in the Scythe trilogy by Neal Shusterman where a super computer with godlike qualities comes to the conclusion that it can’t create the next generation of super computers without knowing, however briefly, what it is like to be a human, so the computer possesses one of the characters, which is traumatic for the human. The point is, the super computer does not become a human and no superior force, not even God, could really become a human in that way.

Neither was Jesus a Superman in the sense of being faster than a bullet or a speeding train. The miraculous powers that he did show, such as healing and walking on water are not necessarily beyond all human possibility as stories of the sort are told of other holy persons. Besides, Superman was from another planet and Jesus was born on this one. Another version of a Superman Christology is the notion, taught by no less a theologian than Thomas Aquinas, that Jesus always knew everything and could never be taught. That would mean that Jesus knew everything about carpentry and could have instructed Joseph in the finer points when he was still a toddler. That’s sort of like climbing up sunbeams.

Unbelief often takes the opposite form where Jesus is considered just another human being, only nicer and wiser than most. This is still wrong, but at least we have a Jesus who could be taught how to use a hammer and a chisel.

In none of these errant models do we have much insight into the mystery of either humanity or God and we don’t learn much of anything about being human. The real mystery of being a human is developing, growing, learning, and changing over the years. Not even his virgin birth, as Matthew and Luke would have it, could change the need for Jesus to learn his table manners. Fantastic as stories like the one about climbing sunbeams are, at least they show that Jesus had to learn how to play nice. The story in Luke about Jesus in the temple is more incisive into Jesus’ young development. Here, Jesus was willing to learn from the elders even as he amazed them with his questions and insights. Like most other children, Jesus also has to learn to remember to let his parents know where he was and deepen his own sense of obedience.

The author of Hebrews stresses the importance of Jesus sharing our humanity in this respect, that Jesus was tested in the same way that we are, although without sin, so that Jesus can help us when we are tested. (Heb. 2: 18) In calling Jesus a “pioneer of faith,” this author is stressing the way Jesus is a model for us, a model for undergoing tests and trials as a human so as to learn how to be a human being. The author of Hebrews also tells us that Jesus “learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.” (Heb. 5: 8–9)

There are many things Jesus taught us about being a human being through his suffering, of which forgiveness is the most profound and challenging. We are prone to think that, in being sinless, Jesus separated himself out from humanity, but although to err is human, and Jesus could and did err, sin is not human; it’s inhuman. That is, we are not full human beings and Jesus is. That is why a tiny babe on his mother’s breast is a model for what it really means to be human.