Thoughts for the Day

John 5:19 “I tell you the truth, the son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees the Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.”

If yesterday we were considering aspects of the “big picture” of Jesus’s mission and purpose, today we consider more the issues of the “day to day”.  As I was thinking about this section of the Lent series, I originally wrote down the heading “God limited”, intending to touch on what it meant for Jesus to “lay aside” his majesty, power, knowledge and the like, to be limited or to limit himself in the exercise of his divinity.  It then struck me that I might also write the heading “God Ltd.”, or even “God & Son Ltd.”, emphasising the complete unity of purpose of Father and Son.  Indeed, Jesus said “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).  Nevertheless, though they may have been of one purpose, they exercised different roles.  And we see here that Jesus laid aside all independence.  Day by day and moment by moment his spiritual radar was tuned to his Father’s will, perceiving what the Father was doing and aligning himself to it.  How did he do this?  Perhaps that’s something to ponder today.  We might answer simply that he was God, but somehow that doesn’t feel it can be the whole answer.  It doesn’t fit with the message that he had to grow up within the limits of his humanity.  It doesn’t fit with the idea of Christ as our example or of exhortations for us to become more Christlike.  During the next week we will look for clues to this in some of the regular patterns of his life.