Fatigue & Faithfulness

Exploring the Tension Between Jesus’ Divinity and Humanity

If you’re interested, last year when we considered this passage, we wrestled with whether or not Jesus actually baptized anyone (John appears to be unclear on this between yesterday’s passage and today’s).

All four gospels demonstrate Jesus’ humanity and divinity. But John has a particular knack for showing the depths of both. In this next story we’re beginning today - a conversation at a well with a woman from Samaria - we will see some of each. But today it begins with noting Jesus’ fatigue.

It’s a great model for us as we seek to follow Jesus’ example. He’s tired from walking and felt the need to sit. He’ll soon express being thirsty. And in the midst of it all, he meets a woman. He’ll have to navigate personal differences with her, both in gender, culture, and religion.

But he does so with great care and human insight. He demonstrates attentiveness despite his fatigue and empathetic concern despite his thirst. He won’t exercise any kind of divine mumbo-jumbo to do so, but with simple love and patience (as well as some blunt intentionality), he demonstrates to us what it is to be a human that resonates with the divine image all at once.

John 4:1-6

Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was making more disciples and baptizing more than John (although Jesus’ disciples were baptizing, not Jesus himself). Therefore, he left Judea and went back to Galilee.

Jesus had to go through Samaria. He came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, which was near the land Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there. Jesus was tired from his journey, so he sat down at the well. It was about noon.

Psalm 8:3-5

When I look up at your skies, at what your fingers made—
the moon and the stars that you set firmly in place—
what are human beings that you think about them;
what are human beings that you pay attention to them?
You’ve made them only slightly less than divine,
crowning them with glory and grandeur.

Prayer

God,

There’s this tension - a good one, I think - between respectfully and fearfully remembering who are as GOD, the most powerful divine creator…and…Jesus, the human one, like us in form.

Most days, it’s easier to remember you as GOD. Not that I can touch those attributes, but that we philosophizing humans are good with the imagination.

But today, I’m so thankful you sent Jesus - a human. A guy who ate food and cried tears and said angry words. Someone who knew puberty and hunger and grief. Someone who considered the beauty of flowers and birds and children.

So help me, God: Help me to cling to the person of Jesus, both human and divine, as the model for how I live and relate to you.

By your spirit & in Christ,
Amen.