To be Human is to Grow

One of the characteristics that makes us human is growth. From our earthbound perspective, we cannot envision angels and other heavenly beings growing, except Hollywood versions like Clarence in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” To us mere mortals, immortality sounds very static. Heaven is perfection, a place where you’ve arrived and growth is passé. C.S. Lewis thought otherwise. I guess he’s found out by now if he was correct.

Whatever the case on that, Jesus certainly exhibited the human characteristic of growth once he entered the created order. Twice Luke comments on this in chapter two. “The child grew and became strong; he was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him.” (verse 40) And verse 52, “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.”

In the art of writing, character growth is an essential element in story development. No growth, no story. And yet, we have a hard time seeing growth in our picture of Jesus on earth. Growth seems to imply imperfection. A God in the process of becoming something more than He was before flies in the face of all monotheistic sensibility.

This is the amazing story of the Gospels, that God became man – and thus a being who grew, who transformed from newborn to child to adult, who as another New Testament writer says experienced life’s temptations just as we do. Was Jesus’ growth purely physical? Not according to Luke. The growth Jesus went through was inclusive of wisdom, spiritual development and social skills, as well as the more expected physical changes.

So many Moderns and post-Moderns struggle with the divinity of Jesus. So many people of faith struggle with the humanity of Christ. This is the incarnational imponderable. And Luke as writer embraces the whole somewhat ambiguous mix. Whereas the tensions of Jesus’ Messianic mission are highlighted in his first visit to the Temple, the tensions in his incarnational role are emphasized in the Temple visit at age twelve.

He must be about his Father’s business, yes. His Father’s business for now is to go home with his parents and be obedient and grow – not like a human, but as a human. And this distinction is far more than mere semantics, for the former is outright heresy, the latter is transformational truth. The tension for Jesus was not just in his God-man combination, it was in his humanness, for he was fully man. Growth brings tension to all of us, for we are ever in transition between what we have been and what we are becoming. Those tensions of mission and role remained with Jesus until the Resurrection. It was only then that those ambiguities were erased once and for all.

Whatever growth looks like in the hereafter, it must contain a different tension than Jesus felt on earth, than we feel in the here and now. But as we have a hard enough time understanding how this factors into our present, we surely have an impossible task fathoming what growth looks like in the eternal hereafter.

Growth is what Elizabeth George speaks of in Write Away as development of fictional characters. Growth is what my therapist speaks of as the necessary ingredient of character development. It is what makes us quintessentially human now, and in all probability somehow even in eternity.

I have seen people who stopped growing in this life. And it is not a pretty sight. For the absence of growth is death.