Even though he was before my time, I’ve always kinda liked Johnny Carson. One of the first things I ever remember seeing on television was Carson doing his Carnac the Magnificent bit. I remember one time hearing Carson discussing the difference between television and movie stars. He said that television stars are the kinds of people we’d walk up to on the street and engage in a conversation. They seem like ordinary people to us – the kind of folks we’d like to get to know. Carson said that this is because they exist in a little box that sits in our living room – they are “among us” (it was more humorous when he said it). Movie stars tend to intimidate people more, Carson said. When we go to movies, we look up to huge screens with enormous, larger-than-life images of celebrities and it creates a sense awe and other-ness. If we see them in public we’re inclined to give them space and respect their privacy.
I think a similar thing happens to us in our understanding of Jesus. We think of him as Savior, Messiah, and Lord. We remember him as the Son of God who came to earth, turned religious practices upside down, and heroically died for all of us. To be sure, these are all deeply and importantly true, but they can tend to create a Carson-esque movie-star understanding of Jesus making him seem almost unrelatable. This is not the Jesus of the Christmas story.
Jesus was a baby – born in the same painful, very human way that you and I were. He cried. He spit up. He did all the things babies do…all of them. Sometimes I think it makes us uncomfortable to think of Jesus this way, but this is how he wanted us to think of him. He wanted us to know him as someone real. Someone we can relate to. Someone we’d walk up to in a coffee shop and have a conversation with. The incarnation of Jesus was not just a theological necessity for achieving the salvation of humankind; it was an act of love committed by a Savior who yearned to connect with us and for us to connect with him.
