The Scandal of the Ordinary Christ
What Jesus endured at the crucifixion wasn’t unique. And that’s exactly why it matters.
Hundreds of thousands of people throughout the Roman Empire experienced the brutality of crucifixion. And Pilate’s Judean governorship was characterized by such extreme sadism that Jewish leaders, including the Herodian royal family, petitioned directly to the emperor for relief.
The historical context shows clearly that Jesus wasn’t treated with extraordinary cruelty. That’s just how Rome did it. The brutality of the Roman Empire cannot be overstated. They were supremely creative in ways to inflict pain while not causing death. The undisputed experts.
The scourging, the mockery, the slow public execution—standard operating procedure. The purple robe and crown of thorns? Yes, a cutting satire intended to embarrass the Sanhedrin. But also not unusual treatment for someone claiming to be a king. Rome had a sense of humor about these things.
When the Jewish authorities handed Jesus over to Pilate, the Roman governor didn’t think, “Ah, this is the Jesus of Nazareth—let’s really make him suffer.” He thought what he always thought: Here’s another local problem interrupting my day.
Solidarity, Not Severity
The point was never that Jesus suffered more than everyone else. The point is that Jesus suffered with everyone else.
It’s not that Jesus went through something terrible specifically for you and me. It’s that Jesus went through the same something terrible that countless people went through all the time. He entered the universal human experience of suffering, not as a spectator, not as a rescuer swooping in from above, but as a participant—a victim.
Jesus is alongside those who suffer. Not suffering particularly—though he does suffer in a particular sense—but suffering universally. Entering into the common human experience for the purpose of redeeming it. The cross isn’t a transaction where God needed a certain quantity of blood to balance some cosmic ledger. The cross is solidarity. The cross is God saying: There is no depth of human suffering I will not enter. There is no darkness where I will not meet you.
What He Did Not Assume, He Did Not Redeem
Gregory of Nazianzus gave us the principle: “What he did not assume, he did not redeem.” The mission of Jesus was to assume upon himself, to take upon himself, to submit himself to being a human person in common with every other human person—in ability, in emotion, in experience, in necessity.
Jesus got hungry. Jesus got tired. Jesus wept.
And Jesus died the way he died not because God required a particularly gruesome sacrifice, but because Jesus challenged the status quo—and that’s what happens to people who challenge empires. His death was ordinary in its brutality. That’s the scandal.
If Jesus had died of old age in his bed, he still would have defeated death. The victory isn’t in how he dies. The victory is in who he is.
The Mundane Messiah
We don’t have many records of Jesus’ childhood. But we know a few things.
We know the Holy Family fled to Egypt—refugees, immigrants, strangers in a strange land. We know Jesus was circumcised on the eighth day like thousands of other Jewish babies, that Mary and Joseph took him to the temple where they encountered Anna and Simeon. We know that at twelve, he was holding his own with the teachers of the law.
And here’s what else I’m pretty sure is true:
Jesus had poopy diapers. He nursed constantly. He woke up crying in the night, wanting his mother. He learned to walk, fell down, scraped his knee, and cried about it. He might have been bullied. He learned carpentry from Joseph. He made friends. He became proficient in the Torah and Scriptures.
The mundanity of Jesus’ life is more essential to his saving work than his miracles or his teachings, as important as both were.
Why the Gnostic Gospels Got It Wrong
The Gnostic gospels—those second-century texts that didn’t make it into the Bible—tried to fill in Jesus’ childhood with spectacular stories. In the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the boy Jesus turns clay pigeons into real birds. He accidentally kills playmates with his divine power before learning to control it.
The point isn’t that Jesus was exceptional from infancy. The point is that he was a boy. A helpless infant who needed to be fed and changed and held. A toddler learning to walk. A teenager figuring out who he was. A human being like every other human being.
That’s precisely what makes him the savior.
The Point Isn’t What Jesus Does
The miracles matter. They point to the larger cosmic reality of what Jesus accomplishes. But they’re not the objective. They’re signs, not the substance. Jesus could have never performed a single miracle and still saved the world. Because the point isn’t what Jesus does. The point is that Jesus is.
The incarnation isn’t primarily about Jesus doing impressive things. It’s about God becoming human. Fully human. Ordinarily human. Scandalously human. Athanasius of Alexandria, writing in the fourth century, put it this way: “God became human so that humans could become God.”
This isn’t paganism. We’re not becoming demigods. What Athanasius means is this: In Jesus Christ, God assumes our nature in order to elevate it. Jesus doesn’t just lower himself into humanity—he raises humanity into God. He restores and completes the image of God that is stamped on every one of us.
He Knows
As Jesus walks through his earthly life, he redeems every moment and particle of human existence:
Being in the womb
Being born
Being an infant, a toddler, a child
Becoming an adult
And yes—even dying
There is nothing about your life that Jesus hasn’t also lived. Nothing about your experience that is foreign to him. Losing a close friend. Enduring unimaginable physical pain. Betrayal by a trusted companion. Being misunderstood. Rejection. Anger. Despair.
The scandal of the ordinary Christ: not a God who fixes our problems from a safe distance, but a God who enters into them completely. The cross wasn’t special because of how much Jesus suffered. The cross was special because of who was suffering—and with whom he was suffering.
Which, it turns out, is all of us.