It reminded me of that age-old question I first heard on All in the Family. When dressing, do you put on a sock and a sock then a shoe and a shoe or do you put on a sock and a shoe and a sock and a shoe?
All of us approach problems differently. We are tied together by nation, state, community or by family, or by likes and dislikes but all of us, even families, are different.
But there is someone whom we are to try to emulate who is more than unique, if there be such a thing, because truly he was the one and only of the one and only. That person was Jesus.
If we want to get a picture of what humanity is meant to be like (and can become) we can't do better than read through the Gospel stories to get a picture of the sort of person Jesus was. Philip Toynbee wrote this in Part of a Journey:
I call myself a Christian because I discern in the New Testament a man whose life, death and central teaching penetrates more deeply into the mysterious reality of our condition that anyone or anything else has ever done. In the Gospels, Acts, and the Epistles, I find a total view of what man is, or what he could be and ought to be, which evokes a response in me such as no other writings have ever done.
In the New Testament, Jesus is presented to us not only as God, the Second Person within the divine Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit, but also as perfect humanity, the one who shed the outer manifestation of his divine glory in the womb of Mary, to be fully clothed with our humanity. You could say that he was still as much God as if he had never been human, but had become as much human as if he had never been God.
No one was ever like Jesus. No human being claimed to be God. No God certainly ever claimed to be man. Jesus was the uniqueness we all would love to claim.
I don't know how he put his shoes and socks on, by the way.
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