“What bowls me over every time I read about Jesus in the Gospels is not the wonderful things he did, not the so-called nature miracles in which the wind and the sea obeyed him, or even his making the dead alive again, for if Jesus is really God, as John Polkinghorne the Cambridge mathematical physicist has said, one would expect that, for he was the Creator personally present in the midst of his creation. If you really believe that Jesus is God become incarnate you will have no trouble with the miracles. No! What overwhelms me is the sheer humanness of Jesus, Jesus as the baby at Bethlehem, Jesus sitting tired and thirsty at the well outside Samaria, Jesus exhausted by the crowds, Jesus recuperating his strength through sleep at the back of a ship on the sea of Galilee, Jesus hungry for figs on the way up to Jerusalem, Jesus weeping at the grave of Lazarus, Jesus thirsting for water on the Cross—for that precisely is God with us and one of us… Far from overwhelming us, God with us and one of us does the very opposite, for in sharing with us all that we are in our littleness and weakness he does not override our humanity but completes, perfects, and establishes it.

“What I find always most breathtaking, however, is that in Jesus the Lord God Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible, stoops down to be so fully one with us… In Jesus, the Word by whom all things in heaven and earth were created became human and communicates with us and addresses us in the frail creaturely form.”