How could God become a man? How could Jesus be fully human and fully not?
I thought of those 3D wooden puzzles my son loves. I can never solve them. Either I get bored, frustrated, or my brain simply doesn’t think that way. And yet, I know and believe they can be solved. I’ve simply accepted that I’m not the one who will solve them.
I thought I should buy a Rubik’s Cube to put on my mantel, as a reminder that I can believe something can be done without ever having solved it myself. Is that the gift of faith?
Jesus’ humanity is undoubtedly complex, complicated, and somewhat unsolvable, and yet it is. Jesus is far more complex than a Rubik’s Cube or a 3D puzzle. I may never fully understand how He could be both fully human and fully not. But even if I never understand it, can I continue to believe it in good conscience? Can I believe that Jesus became human without understanding how it happened? Maybe what made Jesus human was beyond our mind’s eye. Maybe what makes us human is beyond our comprehension.
And doesn’t that beg another question? What truly makes us “human”?
it’s a relevant question right now, with AI’s abrupt onboarding into our lives. What makes us human? Is it a beating heart, flesh, and bone? Is it language and communication? DNA? Is it something biological, spiritual, physical, or emotional? Is it knowledge, the ability to love and create—or even recreate—or perhaps logical thinking?
Is it solving a puzzle like the Rubik’s Cube? Or is it NOT solving the puzzle? To AI, the Rubik’s Cube probably isn’t so complex? Maybe part of what makes us human is that we cannot solve it so easily.
So we twist and turn the cube, and the more we twist, the more complex it becomes. The harder it seems to solve.
Some interesting fact I learned about A Rubik’s Cube, it has more than “43 quintillion possible arrangements”. The cube was invented in 1974. The man who created it is still alive. Ernő Rubik created it as a “structural and geometric model to help his students understand three-dimensional movement.” It took him a month to solve his own puzzle. A teacher spent a month solving a puzzle he had created to help his students learn something. That’s dedication.
Clearly so passionate about teaching, so in love with learning, and so desperate to help students understand something that Erno created something entirely new to teach it. Is that what makes one human? Creating something to help someone else?
His creation became the best-selling puzzle toy in history, selling more than 500 million cubes and evolving into games, sporting events, movies, and books.
How wonderfully simple the Rubik’s Cube is. Simple enough for a child to play with, and yet seemingly unsolvable by the average human being. in fact less then 6 percent of the world’s population is believed to be able to actually solve the colorful puzzle.
And yet, everyone believes it is solvable, brilliantly conceived, and beautifully constructed, even if they could never solve it themselves and we buy them, 500 million to be exact. The appeal isn’t mastery, but challenge. is this in part why God presents himself a mystery?
So why do we struggle so much with faith? Why do we feel the need to understand every angle, every dimension, every moving part before we can believe something is true? Why do we insist that to believe in God we must solve him ourselves first? Maybe faith is not the absence of questions. Maybe it is the willingness to believe that something can be true even when we cannot quite wrap our minds around it. Maybe it has more to do with engagement with the questions, than solutions and answers. I may never understand how Jesus could be fully human and fully God. I may twist and turn that truth in my mind for the rest of my life, looking at it from every angle, trying to make the pieces fit. And maybe that is okay. After all, my inability to solve a Rubik’s Cube doesn’t make the cube any less real, any less brilliantly designed, or any less solvable.
Perhaps my inability to fully comprehend the humanity and divinity of Jesus doesn’t make it any less true, either. Maybe faith is trusting the Creator even when I cannot quite solve the creation.
Perhaps I really will buy that Rubik’s Cube for my mantel. Not because it will answer my questions, but because it will remind me that ‘solving something and believing in something are not always the same thing.’
…and I will be reading Erno’s book, Cubed: the Puzzle of us all!
