To feel or suffer with

I'm getting ready to start working on the last lesson of our The Jesus I Never Knew class. Chapter 14 is called "The Difference He Makes." Did Jesus make a difference? Obviously, I would say that the answer is 'yes.' What difference did he make?

One of the six impressions of Jesus that Yancey talks about is that Jesus was a portrait of humanity. I think I might understand this best if I call it a bridge.

First, Jesus was a window for us to finally see God -- before Jesus, God's creation had no real image of who God was. We were meeting in class one week, and one of the tasks we were discussing was to look at the events of Holy Week and try to decide what we could learn about God from each one. One class member said, after reading about Jesus' trial, that she couldn't see God at all in this event. She could not see anything about God. I think the key to this exercise was to realize that if we look at Jesus -- how he acts in various situations, then we can see and understand God. Want to know what God is like? Watch how Jesus behaved. Jesus demonstrates for us God's nature.

In addition, Jesus is a mirror. By looking at Jesus, we can see what humanity was meant to be. In Jesus, humanity is not distorted or degraded by sin. In Jesus, we see man as God created him. If we are made in the image of God, then Jesus reveals what that image should look like.

But, as huge as that is, it that all there is? Where is the other end of the bridge? How did the coming of Jesus to the world affect God? Yancey put to words something that I have felt to be true for a couple of years. Through Jesus, God learns what it is like to be human. Because of Jesus, God learns what pain is like, what temptation is like. Because of that, Jesus becomes our sympathetic advocate. Yancey explains that sympathetic comes from the Greek root words syn pathos -- the feel or suffer with.

Through Jesus, we learn what it means to be human, and God learns what is is like to be human. Through Jesus we understand ourselves, and who we were meant to be. Jesus becomes our advocate to God.