A Holy Week reflection from someone in their “Jesus year”
I turned 33 this year. I know this may seem young to some, but I have to be honest, this hasn’t been my favorite year to be in a body.
My lower back makes a sound when I get up from the floor that I can only describe as geological. I need a coffee to remember why I walked into rooms, and I can’t really digest fried food anymore — at least comfortably. My body, which I was once fairly confident in, has started filing formal complaints.
And yet, this is the age Jesus was when He taught His disciples, challenged the religious authorities, and walked through Holy Week.
At 33, I’m proud to say I’ve accomplished some things, but compared to Jesus? At 33 I still struggle being taken seriously as a leader among older adults. Did Jesus? At 33 I feel like I’m starting to notice age, but also feeling like I should have my whole life ahead of me. Did Jesus?
Let’s think about this for a second. A Semitic man, 33 years old. Not some ethereal, glowing, untouchable deity floating six inches off the ground through Jerusalem, but a 33-year-old man, with tired feet that had been walking nearly constantly for three years. With real grief over a dead friend (John 11:35 — the shortest verse, and maybe the most important one). With a body that sweat blood because the anxiety of what was coming to Him was so overwhelming to His senses His capillaries literally ruptured.
God the Creator didn’t just observe our suffering from a safe theological distance. He inhabited it. He inhabited us. At 33.
Jesus wasn’t performing humanity. He was human. A fully embodied, sometimes-exhausted, emotionally-present 33-year-old human.
Oh, and Jesus isn’t just a “was”, He is also an “is”. Jesus isn’t performing humanity. Jesus isn’t performing deity. Jesus is human. Jesus is God.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent a lot of my life relating to Jesus mostly as God-in-a-costume. I thought of Him as just visiting our neighborhood, politely tolerating the smell. The incarnation though, isn’t a metaphor; it’s the centerpoint of history. God the Creator didn’t just observe our suffering from a safe theological distance. He inhabited it. He inhabited us. At 33.
This means when He was led through the streets of Jerusalem — mocked, misunderstood, abandoned by His friends — He knew what it was like to be us. Not just generally. Specifically. The loneliness, the body that fails, the relationships that crack under pressure, the moments where you’re crying for help and the silence feels like an answer.
This Holy Week, I want to invite you — especially if you’re in your early 30s — to sit with the fully human Jesus. Not just the resurrected one (though He is glorious) but the one in the garden at Gethsemane. The one on the road. The one who curses a fig tree because He is hungry and tired and it bears no fruit. The one who, at our age, chose to go through with the hardest week of His life for us.
He didn’t do it in theory. He didn’t do it from a position of ease. He did it from inside a body like mine, and like yours.
Thank you, Jesus.
