Human Potential

The incarnation, that God has come among us as one of us, speaks to us in numerous ways. In Jesus our Immanuel, God with us, we see God as Savior and Redeemer. God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. He is also a Master and Teacher who shows us how to live as God within our humanity. Another way to see Jesus is as Adam, the first human of a new race, elevating humanity to all that God desires.

If these ways of understanding the incarnation are familiar, perhaps thinking of Jesus as pure human potential is new to some. We are not speaking of autonomous potential, something we could do on our own, but what is possible in union with God. In other words, what we see explicitly in him resides inherently in us all, for Jesus is one of us. He is no alien, a creature of a whole different nature. Because we insist on the truth of his full humanity, we see in Jesus the potential for our own selves in who he is, the divine in perfect union with the human.

We are the ones alienated from our own real humanity, that is, the way we were created to be in communion with God. This is what we see exemplified in Jesus as he embodies our potential, not something attainable through our efforts, but according to the working of the grace and power of God through our faith.

Our very existence is due to the initiative of God’s love. He does not create us fully mature, but with the possibility and design to be as Christ is. The fact that we begin not fully mature is no oversight of God, a failure to create as intended, but the opposite. God gives us our gift of being (how we are created), but it is distinct from the gift of our becoming (the transformation we experience in life). We come into the world with being, bare existence, as God wills. The gift of becoming is granted to us through learning faith, hope, and love in this earthly life.

Jesus himself experienced the same gift of becoming, “growing in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man” (Luke 2:52). As the Hebrew writer observes, Jesus learned obedience through his sufferings, which is another way of describing this process of becoming (Hebrews 5:8).

One way to think of God is as pure possibility. Often our imagination is impoverished and our vision too limited to hear and see what God is doing. When our imagination is based solely on the hope of being saved in the sense of forgiven for our sins and not sent to hell, we are lacking a vision of “growing to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13). We have a very emaciated grasp of the totality of our salvation. We will become as he is, the One who is the potential of humanity as predestined by God.