The reason for such puzzling contradictions springs from the fact that the New Testament makes two apparently contradictory claims about Jesus. To some people, the, claims cancel each other out. To others they appear absurd. But to the vast procession of Christians down through the ages, it has seemed necessary to insist upon both affirmations. They can be stated in a number of ways:
Jesus is both God and man.
He is both human and divine.
He shows us who God is and he shows us what we ought to be.
Or, to put the same thing in Biblical terminology, "in him the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily" ( Col. 2: 9), and yet he is one who "in every respect has been tempted as we are" ( Heb 4: 15).
Well-meaning Christians come to grief when they attempt to make one of these affirmations without the other. There are plenty of people, for example, who are willing to admit that Jesus was a very, very, very good man, or even a very, very.. very, very good man-but they balk at the notion that he is divine.
On the other hand there are Christians who assert emphatically that because Jesus was divine, he knew everything, and there was nothing he could not do. They are annoyed if you point out to them that Jesus got tired, hungry, discouraged, and lonely like any other normal human being, even though these facts are repeatedly stressed in the Gospels.
Both groups of people miss the point of the New Testament. Take the opening verses of the Fourth Gospel, for example. The author has been talking about the "Word" of God, which in the Old Testament was a way of describing the power and creativity of God: "By the word of the Lord the heavens were made" ( Ps 33: 6). God's "Word" is his creative power, by means of which he enters into relationship with men, addresses them, tells them and shows them who he is. And what does the Fourth Gospel say? It says, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us" ( John 1: 14). "Became flesh" means, quite simply, "became a man" like us. Here is the showing forth of God's creativity and power, in a flesh-and-blood human life. God is not just pretending to be a human being. He has become one of us, in a man who was called Jesus Bar-Joseph, son of a Nazareth carpenter. When Jesus gets hungry, it is real hunger, and not just a pretense. When nails are driven into his hands, they hurt, and real blood flows from the wounds. And the thing which the New Testament dares to assert is that in the life and the teaching, the death and the resurrection, of this man God himself was present in a unique way, so that if you want to see most clearly who God is and what he has done, you look at this same Jesus Bar-Joseph.
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