Sermon Tone Analysis

Why Did Jesus Have to Have Skin Cells and Platelets?

There’s a great story I heard on National Public Radio of a four-year-old girl, despite having decidedly secular parents, developed a fascination with all things Jesus.

Christmas was the immediate reason for her preoccupation with the second person of the Trinity, and but her father bought her a children’s Bible and read to her other things that the adult Jesus said and did.

Except one.

One day she and her father were driving past a church and she looked up from her carseat and saw a crucifix on the side of the building.

“Who’s that?” she asked.

Quick parental evaluation: what do you say?

Is your four-year-old ready to find out that her favorite character grew up and got nailed to a cross?

Gladly, he went for the truth: “That’s Jesus.”

He said to her, and this is a direct quote,

Well, you know, he ran afoul of the Roman government.

This message that he had was so radical and unnerving to the prevailing authorities of the time that they had to kill him.

They came to the conclusion that he would have to die.

That message was too troublesome.

The father didn’t say how she responded to this, only that she most definitely remembered it.

But I have to imagine that a little girl would be shocked that the baby Jesus who first fascinated her, the Jesus who welcomed little children into his arms, would be strung up to die.

This little girl wasn’t the first to find it shocking that baby Jesus became crucified Jesus—the disciples did it long before her.

But it wasn’t a surprise for the Son of Man himself.

He predicted it.

Jesus was born to die.

That’s why he had to be incarnated—only beings made of flesh and blood can die.

And that’s what Hebrews 2 tells us that we didn’t know before.

The “incarnation” we celebrate at Christmas is, to be a bit more Anglo-Saxon about it, “enfleshment.”

It’s the addition of skin and bones and sinews and platelets and basal ganglia to a spiritual being who never had them before.

Was it truly necessary for God the Son to acquire a right hand?

Was his arm not already mighty enough to save?

Why Did Jesus Have to Have Skin Cells and Platelets?

1. Jesus acquired a body because he had to die

The author of the epistle to the Hebrews gives us one big, sobering reason why the Son of God had to be a human baby: it’s precisely because, one day, he had to die.

There aren’t many things that people can do that God can’t.

I can think of two, and they’re tightly related: we can sin, and we can die.

In order to save us from the former, Jesus had to join us in the latter.

It takes death to end death.

When your children are really in trouble, you go to them.

I'm sure that's true of teenagers stranded with a flat tire, but I don't know that from experience yet.

I'm thinking instead of rescuing my two-year-old when he is distraught on the trampoline—which he calls the "bampane."

More than once I have had to give up my fatherly dignity and crawl onto the trampoline to retrieve a crying Ellery.

Dads and Moms have to go into pillow "forts" and apple trees, back seats and bunk beds.

When you love your kid, you go where they are to help them.

That's what Jesus did for his children, namely us.

Only his work was a lot harder than shimmying onto a top bunk, because we had gotten ourselves in a much greater mess than my two-year-old yet can.

Even our fictional stories have “Christ-figures," characters who give up their lives and yet "rise again"—from Frodo Baggins to Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities—because that’s the kind of world we live in, one in which redemption takes terrible sacrifice.

As the author of Hebrews later says,

Jesus had to have flesh because it had to be broken.

He had to have blood because it had to be spilled.

For us.

And the author of Hebrews clarifies and gives greater depth to that little prepositional phrase, “for us.”

He clarifies that in order to get to the death which afflicts humanity he had to destroy the one who has the power of death.

As John says elsewhere, Jesus came to “destroy the works of the devil” (1 Jn 3:8).

And not just his works, but the devil himself, Hebrews 2 tells us.

2. Jesus acquired a body because he had to destroy the devil

Look at the passage again:

Make no mistake: Jesus came to destroy the devil and to wrench his greatest weapon from his cold dead hands.

Indeed, what does it mean that the devil had this "power of death"?

It can't mean merely that the devil could kill people.

He could, as the story of Job shows when Satan kills Job's children, but only with permission from God. No, the meaning of this phrase—that Satan has "the power of death"—is hidden in plain sight in the very name "Satan."

"Devil" is just a different word for the same thing: "slanderer" or "accuser" or "adversary."

Satan has the power of death because he knows the rules of the universe: sin must be paid for.

And he stands against us before God and accuses us of sin—not very hard to do.

He calls on God to destroy us for that sin.

And yet Jesus, through death, has destroyed him.

By dying the death we should die he removes from Satan the only real power he has against us.

But that doesn't mean he has no other weapons.

In George Orwell’s 1984, the Big Brother who holds the power of life and death in that dystopian society may not even still exist by the time the story occurs.

Probably doesn’t.

But you don’t have to be alive to wield fear over people.

That’s another reason why Jesus came to undergo enfleshment and live on this little planet.

3. Jesus acquired a body because he had to set fear's slaves free

He came, this passage tells us, to...

That’s us.

It’s not just the devil that troubles us, it’s not just death; the mere fear of death chains us.

This is the reason snake oil is a multi-gazillion dollar industry.

Jesus had to take on flesh and die in order to make this fear go away.

There will be no amped up infomercials hawking miracle anti-aging treatments in the New Earth.

The human race won’t have to fear death anymore; we’ve been delivered from that bondage.

Clearly not all people are.

Just the other day while my Christian in-laws were here we were talking about Catholic neighbors that they've known for 30 years.

It was an older couple; the husband died just a few years ago in his nineties.

The wife is now in a nursing home.

These two attended mass every single day.

Every single day.

They were great neighbors, nice people with a stubborn streak that kept them going—they were very hard workers.

They were almost never interested in talking about religion with my in-laws despite their daily mass attendance.

But over the years religious conversation happened a few times anyway.

And before her husband died the wife confided to my in-laws that he was indeed afraid to die.

Years of mass.

Still afraid to die.

I did not know this man personally, but that sounds like lifelong slavery to me.

There is a natural aversion to pain that we all experience.

No one relishes the thought of cancer or dementia and the physical trials they bring.

And death for a Christian is still a loss: a loss of all the things he or she would experience otherwise, and a loss for the family of the deceased.

Sorrow is the feeling of loss, and sorrow is not wrong.

We shouldn't put subtle pressure on our sufferers as a Christian community, expecting them not to feel sorrow.

But we should encourage them not to feel the fear of death.

We know what's on the other side.

We need not—we should not—be in bondage to that fear.

Younger folks, I probably don't have to tell you not to fear death.

We don't even think about it.

Everyone below 40 is invincible!

But when those thoughts do come, don't fear.