Monday, February 23: David Franson

Hebrews 2:7. Therefore he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect.

Fully human in every way? I grew up with a sentimental, airbrushed notion of Jesus. His hair was radiant, and everyone looked happy to be with him. He was not someone I could identify with. I also received the sentimental version of the incarnation – a quiet, happy baby, sitting in a thing called a “manger,” and receiving gifts from kings. Many years later I figured out that a manger is a thing that animals eat out of, and that it’s usually located in the same place where animals do other business.

That was a significant realization for me, but another followed at the end of 2013, when our youngest child was born. Our first infant, he was, in the early days, this tiny thing, utterly helpless. A human being, usually asleep, entirely dependent on the adults around him, and able to lie on my arm in the space between my hand and my elbow. I remember at the time, though the haze of sleep deprivation, being amazed that the Almighty would choose to experience this, would choose to be this.

Although there are joys in infancy, it may be a mercy that we forget those early years. There is, as I’ve seen in the past year, a lot of pain and discomfort. Teeth come in, but we don’t understand why, or what’s going on. We have needs, but we can’t communicate them. Our wills are thwarted by the big people, and we can do nothing about it. It’s an extraordinary thing, but also profoundly ordinary – we’ve all been this at some point. Jesus was this too, one of us, fully and completely.

Jesus is one of us in birth, and being fully human, he is one of us in death as well. In Lent, Jesus turns towards Jerusalem and the trials that await him there. We, too, will turn towards those things as we follow His story. Just as we have our aches, pains, trials, and disappointments, Jesus had His, and He suffered them as one of us. We may have to walk the road alone at times, but we can take comfort that our savior has shared in that experience, and knows it as one of us.

  —David Franson