Jesus is bicultural. He is indigenous to heaven, to eternity, to the divine abode. Since before the beginning He circulated in divine three-ness entirely at home amid the great expanse. Then He took on flesh becoming human, donning another way to be in the world; new body, new culture. He had skin color, a local accent and the history of the Jewish people flowing through His veins.
Jesus hosted two cultures within one person. He lived as God and man, born of Heaven and with Palestinian blood, fluent in the language of the stars and Hebrew and Aramaic. His Kingdom home shaped His worldview as He walked dusty Jerusalem streets, seeing abundance and not scarcity, seeing hope beyond the empire and love mightier than imperial fear. But the Galilean street affected Him, too, forming His bone-deep experience of poverty, allowing Him to know what the flight of a refugee feels like and how injustice hangs on the face of your mother. Both places, both cultures are in Jesus.
When we say Jesus is fully God and fully man, we declare that He is ever and always bicultural. He carries all of divinity and humanity within His person where ever He goes, however He reaches us. Two backdrops sculpted Him into the Christ we crave, each tells us something about the Savior we follow. Operating from tandem worlds allows Jesus to connect with us with both deep fidelity and fluency.
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Sometimes I read Gospel stories and feel His angst under the surface… the struggle of living as a bicultural person. People saw Him as Palestinian, they heard His Galilean accent and responded to what they saw. ‘Can anything good come from that part of the empire?’ they asked. But He was also Other, never less God, but that divine dna invisible to those in His neighborhood. What was visible was only part of the story, a fraction of who He knew Himself to be.
I think dueling identities is the plight of those of us who enter into bicultural living. I married into bicultural life, as did Claude. My children were adopted into a bicultural, bilingual and bicontinental life. Some are born into it like Jesus. We live in two worlds. It’s good, it affords us many opportunities and adventures. But it has seasons friction, moments of internal angst others don’t see. It can feel isolating and even disorienting. People see one thing, not the other, yet they both define what is true of me.
I find comfort in knowing that Jesus understands this in His gut, as He embodies bicultural living. He comes from two places yet allows that cultural convergence to unleash goodness in both worlds. He never disowns one or diminishes another. Each contribute to His salvific presence on the earth, as each of my cultures lend something significant to who I am and what I can offer others.
I know it is a simple thing, but it has been helpful more than once in this life I’m living to remember and call upon the Bicultural Jesus, who knows both my visible and invisible identity.
Wow yes. This is really good (I’m going to link to it from my blog). 2 years ago, I went on a trip to China, and ever since then I’ve been trying to understand culture and the world and how God is so much bigger than I thought.
I’m realizing that learning about and meeting people from other cultures isn’t just something extra on the side that people do if they’re missionaries- no, it’s so central to what Christianity is. (I wrote about that here: God of Language.) And your post talks about that exact same thing- that Jesus lived in 2 cultures. It’s not just some nice thing that Christians can do if they have time- it’s WHO JESUS WAS and basically it’s what God’s mission has always been.