John 6:42
They said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does He now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”
The Incarnation has always been the hardest doctrine for people to believe. There is something so dullingly ordinary about what our senses present to us that we figure there just can’t be anything going on behind the scenes with things and people that we see every day. Somehow, the knowledge that Jesus was fully human, with parents like anybody else, made it impossible for His hearers to believe that He could be anything special – even when they had just seen Him perform the miracle of the loaves and fishes. This curious inertia still afflicts us today. We find it hard to believe that our dull and uninteresting neighbor will one day go up to heaven just as we found it hard to believe the fascinating and amazing Jesus came down from there. The problem might lie not with the teaching of Christ concerning His origin and our destiny, but with our ability to believe. Today, believe.
