Pardon Me, May I Blaspheme Our Lord and Faith?

*Warning* This post is blunt. If you don't like bluntness, change the channel.

The local progressive Christian blog has started a conversation about the humanity of Christ. Always a good conversation to have in my opinion. However, they've started a general musing in the public arena about Jesus' masturbatory habits.

Wonderful.

There ought to be a statistic. I'll make one up. Every 8 minutes someone in the world realises that the "fully God, fully man" Jesus enjoyed many of the more crude aspects of the "fully man" side of things. Someone somewhere right now is astonished anew at the thought of the Lord being constipated, having a runny nose or a bad hair day. Every now and then, this fixation with the bodily functions of God turns to the sexual. Sometimes it gets turned into a philosophically thoughtful and poetic book, a crap movie or a downright blasphemous play.

I don't think there is anything wrong with contemplating the humanity of Jesus. It helps us understand the depths of His sufferings and sacrifice. It shows us that He can relate to the most mundane of our issues. Where that contemplation takes a nasty turn is when He is ascribed sinful behaviours. I realise that many of you who read this think that Christ (of whom I am not ashamed) is a lunatic or liar. I, and billions like me, believe He is Lord. We believe He is Lord because He was the pure and blameless sacrifice. As death came through Adam, we receive Life anew through
Christ. Jesus' death and resurrection have brought us into renewed communication with God.

While He was undeniably fully human, He was also fully God and therefore without sin. The fully Human half of Jesus was born into a Jewish family, a descendant of David. (See Matthew 1 for His completel lineage.) That fully-human Jew was a member of a religion that holds masturbation to be a sin. To suppose that He masturbated is to blaspheme the Lord.

Cole Wakefield tells me that Jesus did not uphold the letter of the Jewish law. That is a misread of His conversations with the pharisees. When Jesus refuted their accusations He was able to do so not by saying that the law was obsolete, but by pointing to another section of the law the pharisees had overlooked in their zeal to persecute Jesus and His followers. In Matthew 5:17, He tells us that he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. Part of His fulfillment of the law surely includes abiding by its strictures.

Yes, Jesus was fully man. Yes He had to go to the bathroom, got hungry and thirsty and felt angry, sad and lonely. Did He sin? No. Contrary to popular culture, blasphemy is not enlightenment. I don't care if you burn Bibles, I don't care if you criticise me or other Christians. None of it has any significance. Please, I ask you, though. Do not profane the Cross of Christ.