Son of Man

Behold, the dwelling place of God is with mankind.    Revelation 21:3

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79 times. That’s how often Jesus refers to himself as the “son of man” in the four Gospel accounts. Theologians and scholars have debated the meaning of this reference for many years. Amateur that I am, I am going to weigh in on the discussion.

We know that birth had significance in the first Century AD and through all of Biblical time up to then. You were who you were born to be. In Matthew’s Gospel account, the first 16 verses summarize Jesus’ ancestry. It is no small thing that he is descended from Abraham. It is no small thing that he is descended from David.

It is likewise no small thing that Jesus’ ancestry was tweaked by some odd interventions. Isaac was not Abraham’s first born. It was Sarah’s insistence on dismissing the maidservant Hagar that cleared the path for Isaac to inherit his father’s fortune.  Jacob stole Esau’s birthright. Judah was an unlikely ancestor of David.

You could say that both Tamar and Rahab were necessary wild cards, and, had not Ruth persisted in following her mother-in-law, her story would have had no telling in Matthew’s account. Moreover, David’s acquisition of Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba, who gave birth to Solomon, another of Jesus’ ancestors, was as shocking as it was fateful. And Mary’s conception of Jesus was likewise not without controversy.

I think Matthew wanted his hearers to understand that Jesus’ lineage was profoundly directed, even forced, by God. Suppose you went to Ancestry.com to research your family tree and found some of these kinds of twists and turns. You might be embarrassed or even proud. But ultimately you would say, “Well, I am all these things. I am all these people.”

Like many, I routinely skimmed the 16 verses that begin Matthew’s account, believing them to be just a routine appendage. But when I read them, I was actually moved to see this parade of humanity that brought Jesus into our midst. We can tell ourselves that Jesus was born of a woman as we are, tempted as we are, human as we are, but I, for a very long time, failed to grasp that.

Not only was Jesus human, he was the product of all that humanity is, the brave, the false, the flawed, the holy. Who better to save all of creation than he who embodies it so exactly? Jesus became everything that we are. He gathered all of our history into himself and became man, the Son of man.

His identity as Messiah is kept quiet during his ministry. He asks his followers not to reveal his identity. Instead he calls himself the son of man, as if everyone he is speaking to is not likewise a son (or daughter) of man. His identity as human is that crucial to his message and his salvific role. To save us he had to be us. He had to feel our pain, know our sorrows and our joys, taste our life.

I also like to think that he enjoyed the title, that he couldn't get enough of the concept. He is human. He is with us. He is like us. All this because of his love for us. 

But Jesus didn't incarnate simply to rub elbows with us. Whatever salvation history you believe in, whatever redemption song you sing, you know that Jesus made something happen and that something, is articulated in terms of birth. We die to sin and are born in Christ. Unless a man is born again etc. etc. (John 3:3) In John's account, Nicodemus cannot believe what he is hearing. How can a physical birth not matter? How can a rebirth even happen? Re-birth language is so familiar to us that we smile at his fatuousness, but Nicodemus was just like everyone else in 1^st Century Palestine.

John the Baptist greets his crowd with accusations and pre-empts their retort with this:

Don’t say to me, ‘We are children of Abraham’ for I tell you that God from these stones can raise up children to Abraham.

The birth that we thought we understood is different from this new birth. We are now heirs of the kingdom. We are children of God. The Son of man has made this so. By becoming us, he changed us. His incarnation has changed the nature of creation forever.  

Our main tie is no longer to our bloodline. Jesus gave us a new identity, one that trumps any other identity we might claim.

There is another twist. 

Jesus was not “made” in the same way that we are. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, made, in some way, directly by God. And who else in the Bible was so made? Why Adam and Eve of course.  And what, in our story, did Adam and Eve do? They began the human story, they were responsible for all they beheld and then they sullied it. It is Jesus, this second Adam as he is often called, who reverses it all. 

He became us to remake us. The incarnate Jesus makes it possible for us to live again perfectly in his perfect kingdom.