WHERE IS JESUS AT HOME?
If home is where you are from, where is Jesus’ home? Is he from heaven or from earth? Both.
Orthodox Bishop Kalistos Ware put it this way, “He was begotten outside time from the Father without a mother, and he was begotten within time from his Mother without a father.”
Jesus is the divine-human. He is from heaven as the pre-existent Son of God, second person of the Trinity. Equally, he is the son of a Jewish girl named Mary who moved around enough that he could be said to be from Bethlehem, out of Egypt and eventually, “of Nazareth”.
The important thing is never to prefer one over the other. Jesus is not from heaven like Superman is from Krypton. He is not a divine being pretending to be human (like Clark Kent). It would also be an error to consider him a human who became divine through transcending the limitations of humanity like the Buddha. Jesus is both fully human and fully divine. He had to be.
To quote the bishop again, “First, only God can save us. A prophet or teacher of righteousness cannot be the redeemer of the world. If, then, Christ is to be our Saviour, he must be fully and completely God. Secondly, salvation must reach the point of human need. Only if Christ is fully and completely a man as we are, can we men share in what he has done for us.”
God saves us by being with us as one of us. Or as the author of Hebrews says,
“Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham’s descendants. For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.” (Hebrews 2:14–18, NIV)
That’s good news!