Perfection

I may get skewered because of this post.

I'm a Superman fan. I once won a coveted "Baldy Award" by writing a letter answering some trivia, and the letter was published in a "Man of Steel" comic book.

So I know Superman pretty well. I know that he sometimes has to rein in his super powers so that people won't know he's Superman, because they'd never guess his identity thanks to that ingenious Clark Kent guise. The only hope the world has is to catch him when he accidentally uses his powers. When he types, for instance, he intentionally has to go slowly; otherwise the typewriter will melt. Of course, no one uses typewriters much anymore, but I think they wrote that into a comic to prove the point.

But he does make mistakes. He's super-strong, but he's not perfect. In the comics, he's repeatedly challenged with moral dilemmas, and sometimes he just drops the ball. Sometimes his mistakes are innocent, and sometimes they involve his super-dumbness, where he does something out of anger and it blows up in his face.

Last week I made a mistake. A big, dumb mistake. As far as I can tell in careful review of the whole lot of events, there was absolutely no "sin" invoved in the whole situation. Just an oversight on my part. It's so embarrassing that I'm not even going to mention what it was. Don't go playing out too many grand scenarios in your head -- I simply broke something that wasn't mine.

Thinking, "What else could go wrong?" my whole day began to sink. I had already been a poopoo-head to my wife because I was all grumpy and what-not. And so I stopped where I was, prayed that God would change my outlook, and I began to ask Him to show me how Jesus would react and handle things if He were in my situation. The time-out was just what was called for. Almost immediately my attitude improved greatly, and I stopped proverbially crying over spilled milk.

Then I thought, "Would Jesus ever have gotten Himself into this situation in the first place?" The Bible teaches us that He was sinless, but noting that my mistake didn't involve sin, I wondered if, say, Jesus ever measured one of the legs incorrectly when he was building a table or something. Did He ever have trouble learning Greek?

I do not, even for a moment, call into question the fact that Jesus Christ did not sin (see Hebrews 4:15). I am also not comparing Him to the fictional character of Superman, just in case you felt I was going that way. But I wonder if you feel it would challenge your faith to think that Jesus might have made some sinless "mistakes." This question is interesting enough for me to have begun looking into it to see what the Scriptures specifically say (or don't say) about it.

If this were so, personally, the thought would help me to realize on an even deeper level that He identifies with me even when I make bone-headed mistakes. It would also let me know that there might literally be a Christ-like way of dealing with them.

Posted in: Jesus, Life