Same Age as Jesus

Gentle Reader,

For I have shown from the Scriptures, that no one of the sons of Adam is as to everything, and absolutely, called God, or named Lord. But that He is Himself in His own right, beyond all men who ever lived, God, and Lord, and King Eternal, and the Incarnate Word, proclaimed by all the prophets, the apostles, and by the Spirit Himself, may be seen by all who have attained to even a small portion of the truth. Now, the Scriptures would not have testified these things of Him, if, like others, He had been a mere man…. He is the holy Lord, the Wonderful, the Counselor, the Beautiful in appearance, and the Mighty God, coming on the clouds as the Judge of all men;—all these things did the Scriptures prophesy of Him.

– Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3.19.2

He was only 33.

Well, ish. Nobody really knows for sure exactly how old Jesus was when He gave up His life to save us. Tradition places Him in His early- to mid-thirties. There’s no reason to argue with that; it doesn’t matter how old He was when He died. What matters is that He did – and that He busted out of the tomb on that holiest and happiest of days.

He is faithful in all things. He promised to send the Holy Spirit to indwell all those who call Him Lord, and so He does.

“…the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.”

– John 14:26 (NKJV)

He will teach us all things. A process that never ends.

Therefore, I find myself pondering the life of Christ in a new way.

I find it very odd to be the same age (or roughly thereabouts) as Jesus was when He took up the rough-hewn cross. He is, of course, eternal. Always existing, never created. But His humanity, the mysterious Incarnation – it was cut so short. Only a few gray hairs would have peppered His head. His face would have been relatively unlined. His body would have been full of strength and energy.

As they say, the prime of life. For us sinners, this age often means that the mistakes of youth are past and the winding down of middle age is yet to come. Barring illness, this is the peak of physicality before the downward slide (because no matter how well you eat and how much you exercise, getting older is a thing that you just can’t escape).

This moment on His timeline, this box on His calendar – He chose to sacrifice Himself.

When we read these words –

For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.

– Hebrews 4:15 (NKJV)

– we tend to focus on temptation as being exclusively tempted to bad. This is true. Yet consider that the Devil would have tempted Jesus with all the good and ordinary things that any man wants – a stable career, a loving marriage, children, a happy home life. I think of the men I know, those in their thirties, who want all these things. Who work for all these things. Who are full of plans and hope.

Jesus’ plan was to give hope by dying.

All the ordinary things He would have wanted, for His humanity was just as complete as yours and mine, lacking on the stain of sin. He set them aside. I certainly want comfort, security, rest. He lacked all of these things as He traveled about, inviting people into the embrace of Kingdom. He had no home. No income. No wife to smooth His furrowed brow. No children of His own to bounce on His knee.

An ordinary-looking man, as Isaiah wrote,

He has no form or comeliness;
And when we see Him,
There is no beauty that we should desire Him.

– 53:2b (NKJV)

But nothing ordinary about Him at all.

I am moved by His sacrifice in a way I’ve never before experienced, a way that I can’t quite express. It makes me ache to know that the Infinite Lord of all creation, who holds everything together by the power of His sustaining word, experienced the cruel anguish of loneliness. Of painfully standing out in and remaining apart from the crowd. He did not have what any of His male contemporaries had. He did not embrace the women who followed Him as anything other than sisters. He had no possessions. No position.

Jesus wasn’t just tempted to sin. He had to have been tempted to set aside the plan and follow the path of family and friendship, the very path that most of us walk without question. No wonder He retreated so often to pray. The tomb of Lazarus and the ground of Gethsemane cannot have been the only places witness to His tears. How He must have missed the intimate, equal, happy fellowship of the Father and the Spirit! How it must have hurt to be separated from them, even if only in a limited way for a limited time.

For He, who had always been God by nature, did not cling to His prerogatives as God’s equal, but stripped Himself of all privilege by consenting to be a slave by nature and being born as mortal man. And, having become man, He humbled Himself by living a life of utter obedience, even to the extent of dying, and the death He died was the death of a common criminal.

– Philippians 2:6-8 (Phillips)

Utter obedience. Not just the obedience of the cross, an agony horrific enough itself. The obedience of daily, even momently, setting aside His human longings, showing us how to be fulfilled and content without any of the usual trappings.

What a marvel He is.