What Would Jesus Take?

So I had an interesting thought earlier today as I was . . . using the facilities here at school: would Jesus have gotten constipated or had to deal with diarrhea? I wonder about this because we affirm that he was truly human and truly divine. There have been times when we've celebrated his divinity so much that his humanity has been eclipsed, and there have been times when we've done the opposite. If we affirm that he was truly human, then the occasional bout with irregularity must have happened. If we affirm that he was truly God, then it would seem that he should never have to suffer the indignity of either of those scenarios (especially before the advent of all the wonderful drugs we use to treat the symptoms of both of those conditions).

Now, another way to approach this is to wonder about Adam & Eve and the Fall. Would Adam & Eve ever have suffered from irritable bowel syndrome before eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil? If we affirm that suffering entered into this world because of our sin, then it would seem that if humanity had stayed sin-free we would also have trouble-free bowels. However, since committing that first sin our bowels have been paying the wages of sin long before our death. :-) Bringing it back to Jesus in a more concrete fashion - if he gorged on grapes, dates and olives as a young boy, he would have to live with the natural consequences of his actions - loose bowels.

Why wonder about this? I favor an approach to my faith that tries to apply universal truths universally - to the time before creation, to our earliest ancestors, to us now, and, if God wills it, to the people that will be alive 200,000 years from now. I think God created us as is - we were no different then than we are now. At some point in our evolutionary journey we learned how to commit sin. Every person, at one point or another, lies for the first time and feels shame when caught. Every person, at one time or another, thrills to the first consciously used bad word that issues from a previously curse-free tongue. At some point, I think, humanity as a whole learned how to commit various hurtful actions that we now call sin. But that jump into sin didn't, I believe, somehow usher in a time of suffering through death and disease.

I take the stories of creation in Genesis as religious myth - stories meant to engage us and teach us universal truths about God, ourselves, and the relationships between Creator and created and between all created beings. So I don't think that, for example, our earliest ancestors gave birth without any birthing pains, or that at some point our earliest ancestors would not have died if they would not have sinned. We are now as we have been - fallible beings created by an infallible Creator, housed in bodies that tend to break down (like everything else in our universe subject to the force of entropy). We suffer, not as a result of original sin, but as an original blessing offered to us by God.

So going back to Jesus, my own response would be that Jesus could have suffered from the same maladies we can suffer now, some due to choice (eating way too much fruit, for example) and some due to chance (catching a cold because you were around someone else who had one). In this way, he was truly like you and me in everything except the willful choice to take actions that would run contrary to the will of God.

Blessings & Peace,

Hugo