Jesus Pooped
It's not as shocking as it sounds. In fact, it's vital to our theological understanding of the Incarnation.
I have my 3-year-old son to thank for this theological essay.
My middle child currently gets stuck on topics, rehashing the same conversations, persistently asking the same loops of whys? daily. I’m sure this is normal toddler brain development, but I don’t remember my daughter repeatedly posing the same questions.
Lately, his favorite questions have circled on God and poop so it was only a matter of time before the two got married.
This morning my son asked me if God eats poop.
I said no. And then tried to direct the conversation to God not needing to eat like people do, except that Jesus did need to eat when he was on earth.
My son responded, "Did he poop, too?"
Why yes, biology necessitates this.
Upon further reflection, I realized that the Incarnation necessitates this as well. Our theology needs Jesus to have mundane, stinky, “let’s not talk about this” bodily functions like pooping, flatulence, burping, and so on. Because if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be fully human.1
Our Victorian human sensibilities would rather we skip this realization, or at most acknowledge it and quickly move on to weightier theological mysteries. But we miss something vital when we downplay the significance of Jesus experiencing the same indignities that we do. We obscure His vulnerability, His humility. We risk undercutting His very humanity.
This is not a novel discussion. Many writers and theologians have pointed out these same things. But we’d rather not dwell on them. Why would we want to revel in a God who makes Himself vulnerable? Who willingly—gleefully?—wraps Himself in all the limitations we’d rather not have. I mean, if I could eat and never have to use the bathroom again, I’d be good with that. But the King of the Universe chooses impoverished parents (so poor they opt for two pigeons for Jesus’s temple dedication) and grows up in the armpit of Israel so close to the heathens they were barely considered Jewish. He undergoes the pain of birth, has his nappies changed and his sensitive man bits exposed, and endures the trials of puberty. His humiliation did not begin with the atrocities of His crucifixion. He had 33 or more years of it before that.
Whatever imperfections his body inherited through his mother’s DNA were on display for people to mock.2 Maybe he had warts or ugly moles or ingrown toenails. Crowded teeth, crooked knees, constipation, or halitosis. These are humanly things, not sinful things. Just effects of living in a sin-marked world.
Why do we think that just because He’s God, Jesus would make Himself impervious to feeling humiliation, shame, or even a sense of ineptitude? Things that all humans experience.
Feelings do not equate with being. And yet, we insist on our Jesus not ever feeling depressed, awkward, clumsy, shy, or bored.
All of these physical and psychological annoyances keep us humble. They force us (if we are honest) to wrestle with our limits and imperfections. They remind us that we are not God.
And yet, they can also remind us that we should strive to be like Him. Not to overcome our humanity, but to model ourselves after His fleshly manifestation.
What if vulnerability is actually a godly trait—not just a human one. Because true intimacy requires risk. It requires vulnerability. The Trinity shares amazing intimacy and God seems to desire to share it with us, too.
If we take away anything from the Incarnation, it should be that by coming down and walking in our shoes sandals, maybe Jesus was actually trying to show us how He wanted us to be, poop, warts and all.
Photo by Claire Mueller on Unsplash
Whether Jesus excreted solid waste was apparently something of a debate in the Church’s early years. We might read this in disbelief but remember the first major conflict to hit the church concerned Jesus’s humanity. This Daily Beast article has a funny rundown of some of the odd (to us) arguments made.
This is debatable, and one’s tradition may determine whether this is even possible, but I hold that Jesus must share some biological matter with Mary in order to be biologically descended from David and have a claim to his throne. It’s not an airtight argument but makes sense to me. For further reading on the importance of Jesus’s biological relationship to Mary, please see Amy Peeler’s excellent book, Women and the Gender of God.
On a separate note, Jesus’s parallels with the sacrificial system in the Torah cannot be understated. The sin offerings were unblemished young males, so to some degree, it’s likely that Jesus had no major physical issues like a missing limb or a systemic skin issue which might have disqualified him under the Law as an appropriate sacrifice. But bad breath? Probably, most certainly. :)