From the Sermon delivered on February 1, 2026 | Who Is This Man?

There's a question a lot of us carry quietly into a new week — not the kind you'd ask at a dinner party, but the kind that surfaces at 6 a.m. when the alarm goes off and the weight of everything settles back onto your chest before you've even put your feet on the floor. Does anyone actually know what this feels like? The Christian answer — the one the letter to the Hebrews makes with startling specificity — is yes. And not just anyone. Jesus, the letter says, had to be made like his brothers and sisters "in every respect" so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest (Hebrews 2:17). This post explores what that means, and why it matters for the way you'll walk through the rest of this week in New York City.

We live in a city that runs on the fantasy of limitlessness. You can have Portuguese wine on a Friday night and be at your desk by Monday morning. You can be in seventeen group texts simultaneously, professionally connected to thousands of people, perpetually productive, always available. And yet somewhere underneath all of that acceleration is the quiet knowledge that we are, in fact, limited — and that this is a problem we cannot solve our way out of.

What Hebrews asks us to consider is that Jesus walked directly into those limits, and he did it on purpose. He was born into poverty. He spent thirty years in an obscure town in Galilee. He moved through the world at three miles an hour — the pace of a human walking, which is emphatically not the pace of a New Yorker, but it was the pace of God incarnate. He lived with hunger. He had, as he told one prospective follower in the Gospels, nowhere to lay his head. The person sleeping in the corner of the subway car, wrapped in a coat that's doing its best against the cold — Jesus's experience of homelessness is closer to theirs than it is to ours.

And then there's the wilderness. Matthew 4 recounts the forty days Jesus spent in the desert — cracked lips, no shade, no food, no company — and a voice whispering: You don't have to do this. Turn these stones to bread. You have the power. One theologian puts it plainly: Jesus accepted no miraculous exceptions to the limits of an authentic human life. He could have opted out. He didn't. And he hasn't forgotten what it cost him. The one who now reigns in glory still remembers the exhaustion, the temptation, the bite of cold on skin. Jesus compassion for us is rooted in a body that suffered the same things ours does.

John Calvin wrote that the Son of Man, in taking on our flesh, also clothed himself with human feelings — so that "he did not differ at all from his brethren, sin only excepted." This is worth sitting with. Jesus did not walk through the world with his feelings dialed down to a professional minimum. He walked through it with the full depth of human emotion, and without the distortions sin produces in ours.

The theologian B.B. Warfield described Jesus's compassion using the Greek word the New Testament favors — a word that literally means intestines, guts. To have compassion in the biblical sense is not a mild warmth toward others. It is a visceral, churning, pit-in-your-stomach sense that things are not right, and a longing that costs something to make them well. When the leper in Matthew 8 says "Lord, if you desired, you could make me clean," and Jesus replies simply "I desire" — we get a glimpse of what that throbbing compassion looks like in action.

And because Jesus loved that deeply, he also got angry. He raged against those who harmed children. He condemned religious leaders who burdened rather than served. He braided a whip and overturned tables when commerce had crowded out the space where his people came to pray. For those of us sitting with our own anger at what's happening in the world right now — in the news, in our city, in our families — Hebrews offers this: Jesus is angrier than you are about what grieves you, and his anger has no sin in it. You can trust him to be angry on your behalf.

The disciples who walked with Jesus kept running into a version of the same bewildered question: What sort of man is this? Matthew's Gospel, particularly chapters 8 and 9, strings together scene after scene with the repeated word: behold. Behold Jesus calming the storm with a word. Behold Jesus healing the paralytic and forgiving his sins in the same breath. Behold Jesus making company with tax collectors — people whose proximity to each other would be scandalous to everyone watching.

Jesus was not a god in disguise, slumming it among humans while secretly opting out of the hard parts. He was fully God and fully human, both at once, all the way through. He held the universe together with his word while also getting tired and hungry. He commanded what the Gospels describe as angel armies while also weeping at a tomb. The crowds kept saying it, because there was simply no category for him: "Never was anything like this seen in Israel." His uniqueness is not just a claim of faith — it's what the eyewitness accounts in the Gospels kept returning to, because it was the most obvious and most disorienting thing about him.

And yet this cosmically singular person — glorified, ascended, enthroned — is the same one Hebrews calls our merciful and faithful high priest. In the biblical imagination, a king represents God to the people; a priest represents the people to God. Jesus is the mediator, the go-between, who stands before the Father in our humanity. The Heidelberg Catechism — a historic confession of Christian faith — puts it memorably: in Christ, we have our own flesh in heaven. Your salvation has a face. It has hands. It has a resurrected, beating heart.

Hebrews 5:2 tells us that Jesus can deal gently with the ignorant and the wayward. That phrase — "deal gently" — carries in it patience, moderation, the capacity to bear with weakness without contempt. The theologian John Owen compared it to a nurse or nursing father with a poor infant. You don't get angry at a baby for being hungry, for crying in the night, for needing more than you have to give at that moment. You bear with it, because you love the child and the child cannot help being what it is. Jesus's posture toward us is something like that.

The image from the sermon was a doctor who travels at his own expense to a remote place, carrying the cure for a disease, and who waits with joy — not frustration — for the sick to come forward and receive it. Jesus is not exasperated when we finally come to him broken and empty-handed. That is what he came for. His joy increases every time someone who has been trying to manage their own suffering finally stops and cries out to him.

Bring him your limits without apology. You are finite. That is not a spiritual failure. Jesus accepted human limits as the terms of real solidarity with you. When your body is exhausted, when your calendar is fraying, when the group texts feel like too much — you are not disqualified from God's presence.

Let him be angry about what grieves you. If you're carrying anger or grief about something in the world, in your family, in your body — you don't have to perform peace you don't feel. Bring it to the one whose anger is righteous and whose love for what is right runs deeper than ours.

Cry out from hour to hour. There are seasons when you need to reach out to Jesus not once a day but once an hour. There is no minimum level of suffering required to come to him for mercy and grace. That is the whole point of a high priest who was made like us in every respect.

Let your struggles be yours without being shattered by them. The theologian Raniero Cantalamessa wrote that the Spirit gives a person "the ability to live the malady in a new way — bearing it, sharing in it, but not being shattered by it." United to Christ, your suffering is no longer only loss. It can become, mysteriously, the very ground on which you come to know and rely on God in a way you could not have otherwise.

King Jehoshaphat — facing a crisis beyond anything his wisdom could navigate — said simply: We do not know what to do, Lord, but our eyes are on you (2 Chronicles 20:12). That is not a triumphant declaration. It is an honest one. And it is enough.

Jesus compassion for the struggling, the wandering, and the exhausted is not a theological abstraction. It is the reason the incarnation happened at all — why the creator was created, why the weaver was woven, why a heart that holds the universe began to beat inside Mary's womb and kept beating through thirty-three years of limits and suffering until, one Friday, it stopped. And then started again. The risen Christ who rules and reigns is the same one who knows what cold feels like on your face, what exhaustion does to your resolve, what it is to feel like you've received the sentence of death. He has not forgotten. He is not disappointed when you need him again.

If you're in a season where getting out of bed feels like its own kind of courage, you are not alone — and you are not outside the reach of the one who became like us in every respect so that he could meet us exactly here. We'd love for you to join us any Sunday at Apostles Uptown, a church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Whether you're a longtime Christian, someone who has never set foot in a church, or somewhere in between — there is room for you at this table.