Jesus Human: Primer for a Common Humanity

Book Synopsis: “What is human” is one of the contentious topics in the world today. We no longer know what a human is. Where once humans made machines, now machines make humans. And the machines humans do make are becoming our most preferred relationships.

In this pathbreaking and provocative book, Leonard Sweet contends it is our sacred duty to be human. Human identity is not who we have become but who we are created to be. Jesus Human explores how Jesus, in showing us the way to God, shows us the way to ourselves and the way to be human. All that it means to be human is here, in one person: Jesus, the greatest human, the most alive human, who ever lived. Learning to be a disciple of Jesus is learning to be a human being in a world that has been humaimed—our true identity has been amputated or disfigured.

In scintillating prose and from a vast panorama of reading, Sweet demonstrates how the Jesus story is about “being” human and “human” being—both of which follow from following Jesus. Jesus gives back to us our full humanity as part of the redemption of all creation. Jesus doesn’t help us rise above our humanity but enter our humanity. In short, discipleship formation or spiritual formation is really Christ formation or human formation.

Sweet insists you can’t be human without the divine, which makes the process of becoming human, or humanation, part of the Trinity’s ongoing incarnation as the Spirit brings Christ to life in each of us. There is no elixir that, when taken, transforms a person into a true human. But there is the Living Water of Life.