My Systematic Theology class has been very different so far from what I was expecting. We are doing a deep dive into the three parts of the Trinity and the Church History behind it. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but last night's class went in ways I wasn't expecting.
We spent far more time talking about the unbroken bones of Jesus on the cross than I would have ever thought possible. It was clearly important to some of my fellow students. They wanted to prove that his bones weren't broken by reaching back to ancient Hebrew prophets.
I've said before that I don't think that Isaiah had a vision of Jesus and then proceeded to write about him hundreds of years before he would appear. The book of Isaiah isn't talking to us or to first century Rome--it's talking to contemporaries of the prophet, telling them what needs to happen now, not what will happen far in the future. It's not sorcery, after all.
One of my professors last year talked about those first Christians who had seen so much in the life of Jesus that challenged them in every way and so to understand, they reached back into their sacred texts to help them make sense of it all. But that's not necessarily what we should be doing.
In fact, I think it's insulting to those texts to treat them as a prelude to Jesus. They have much to teach us, but it's not about predicting the arrival of Jesus.
It's clear that some of my fellow students are coming from a very different tradition than mine--but some of my future parishioners may be too. I'm trying to keep an open mind as we talk about whether or not Jesus had bones that could be broken.
It all leads back to a much larger question: what does it mean to be both human and divine? And that's an issue that clearly we're all still struggling to comprehend.
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