The Unbearable Weight of Perfection: Wrestling with Jesus' Humanity

How Can I Reconcile Jesus’ Divine Advantage with His Human Struggle?

The Question That Won’t Let Me Go

I’ve been wrestling with something lately. This is something I used to be afraid to even ask out loud.

It’s about Jesus.
Not just who He is, but how He walked this earth.

What it really meant for Him to be both fully divine and fully human.

Because honestly... how can you be 100% of one thing and 100% of another?

For most of my life, I avoided that question. I didn’t want to doubt, and I didn’t want to unravel what I thought was settled truth.

I felt guilty about having questions or not understanding complex answers.

So, it just sat in my mind, in a box labeled “The Mysteries of God.”

But the more I rebuild my faith from the rubble of what collapsed, the more I realize that some questions are worth sitting with.

Some tensions are meant to be held, not solved. My faith does not depend on impeccable knowledge.

But I want to better understand the humanity of Jesus, so that His life will inspire greater worship from me, not from obligation, but from deep reverence and heartfelt love.

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From Ruin to Reconstruction

If you’ve followed my previous 6-part series, you know I’ve been picking up the pieces of my faith—trying to find what’s real after colossal failure of a system that once claimed to have all the answers.

Here is the 6th article in that series:

6 - Reconstructing My Faith: Standing Firm While Exposing Evil

This current article you’re reading lays the groundwork from bridging the gap between my last series and my 7-part Easter series on the last week of Jesus’ life

1 - Welcomed With Palms, Left With Silence
2 - Righteous Fire in a Holy Place
3 - The Table, The Garden and The Kiss
4 - Condemned By Cowards
5 - The Sky Went Dark When He Bowed His Head
6 - The Veil Was Torn, The Earth Trembled, and the Grave Was Silent
7 - Before The Stone Was Rolled Away

I’m not writing from certainty.
I’m writing from hunger.

I’m walking through the final week of Jesus’ life—not as a theologian, but as someone who wants to know Him and appreciate him in a way I never have before.

And I invite you to walk alongside me, and share your thoughts as this inspires you.

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The Divine Advantage?

I used to hear people say, “Well, Jesus was God, so of course He couldn’t sin.”

It always rubbed me the wrong way. Not just because it felt dismissive, but because it made His life feel like a script, not a sacrifice.

Like everything He did was inevitable. Automatic.

And then it could be used as a license to not have to struggle, and blithely say that Jesus paid the price.

But I get why people say that Jesus couldn’t possibly have sinned. I mean, if He’s divine, doesn’t that mean He’s above it all? Immune to the flaws and failures that we struggle with every day?

It’s suggesting that He had this divine advantage that set Him apart from the mess of human existence.

And yet, if He did, wouldn't that make Him the biggest fraud of all time?

If Jesus was never truly vulnerable, if He was never at risk, then how could He really understand what it’s like to be human?

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” —Hebrews 4:15 (RSV)

That verse both comforts me and confounds me.

How could He feel what we feel, be tempted like us… and yet remain sinless?

I don’t know if I ever sat with that question in depth before.

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The Crushing Weight of Perfection

Maybe the miracle is this:

JESUS faced every moment of temptation with the full weight of heaven and hell hanging in the balance… and never wavered.

Because if Jesus couldn’t sin, if He was just walking through life with some kind of divine force field that kept temptation from touching Him… how can He truly understand my struggle?

How can He honestly advocate for me if He never felt the pull to fall like I do?

Maybe I’ve been looking at it backwards all along.

Maybe I’ve been staring so hard at His divinity that I’ve missed the bleeding edge of His humanity.

The truth is, Jesus wasn’t just any human.

Jesus was called by his Father to do something that no one else has ever been asked to do, something that no one else could ever accomplish.

He had to be absolutely perfect.

“You know that He appeared in order to take away sins; and in Him there is no sin.”
—1 John 3:5 (NASB95)

Every thought, every motive, every action had to be spotless.

He wasn’t shielded from pain, or doubt, or temptation.

In fact, His divine nature, inherited from his heavenly Father, didn’t make the struggle easier, it made it more excruciating.

He knew exactly what was at stake with every decision He made.

And God granted him the power and authority of Heaven.

Imagine being constantly tempted to wield your own power to avoid suffering.

To walk away from betrayal, heartbreak, and the weight of the world’s sin.

Imagine knowing that you could call down legions of angels to rescue you at any moment, but choosing not to.

Choosing to stay.
To endure.
To carry it all.

And not just carry it, but bear the guilt and shame of every sin ever committed.

To face not just physical agony, but the unimaginable weight of separation from God, his Father, the one thing He had never known.

That’s what makes His sacrifice so profoundly different from anything we could ever comprehend.

That perfection wasn’t robotic. It was costly and excruciating.

It meant saying “no” to pride, power, escape, and relief, over and over again.

It meant holding the line every time, for a people who would deeply reject Him.

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A Different Kind of Suffering

I now believe that Jesus wasn’t insulated from pain because of His divinity.
In many ways, He felt it more.

He knew what was coming. He agreed to be The Lamb.

And He knew He could stop it.
And yet, He chose not to.

“Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and He will at once put at My disposal more than twelve legions of angels?”
—Matthew 26:53 (NASB95)

He chose to stay.
To suffer, and to die, in obedience to his Father's will.

All while carrying the unbearable weight of humanity’s sin on His back… including mine.

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Love as a Choice, Not a Trait

The more I sit with this, the more it just leaves me in awe.

Because His perfection wasn’t just a divine attribute, it was a relentless act of love.

A choice made in sweat, blood, tears, and silence.

Not once. But continually.
In the desert.
On the hillside.
In the garden.
In the courtroom.
On the cross.

“And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
—Philippians 2:8 (NASB95)

And the more I let myself feel the reality of that choice—He HUMBLED HIMSELF—the more I believe He sees me.

Not from a distant throne of majesty, but from a place of shared pain.

He left his divine home, the safety of his Father's eternal realm, and risked losing it all.

And this is why I love so much the thought of Jesus, the Son of God, seated at God’s right hand, as our ADVOCATE, because He lived and suffered as a man, to the utmost limit of human endurance.

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Where It Hit Me

I still don’t fully understand it. I probably never will on this side of the grave.

But I’m done trying to tie it up in neat theology or wrap it up in glossy euphemistic language to make it sound like I have it all figured out.

I just want to feel the weight of it.
To sit in the tension.

To let the unbearable perfection of Christ humble me so deeply… and maybe restore me, as I realize the love in His heart for me, and for all of humanity.

I am not worthless.
I am not worthy.
But I am loved.

And I want that love to transform me.

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My Closing Thought:

Maybe the greatest proof of His divinity wasn’t that He couldn’t fall,
but that He could have, and chose not to, impelled by love divine.

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Coming Next:

The next article is Part 1 of a 7-part series on the last week of Jesus’ life.

I walk into the streets of Jerusalem (in my mind 😄)

I want to feel a sense of what the crowds felt when they cried out.

And to consider how this set in motion the final days and hours of Jesus life, as the clock started ticking toward betrayal.

You’re welcome to follow along, and join in conversation too!
(oh, and you might have noticed, sometimes I write about other stuff too, like my kids and their cuteness and absurdity, hope you don’t mind)