In the days leading up to the Fourth of July this year, I was laid up with a cold.
The classic summer cold: plenty of congestion, coughing, sneezing, runny nose, even a low-grade fever.
For three days, the farthest I got from home was my backyard to water the plants, because I had my cold in the middle of a heat wave, and they wouldn’t survive without water.
At least I had an excuse to lounge all day in the air conditioning, watching baseball and the World Cup and letting my family take care of me.
It really shouldn’t have been a surprise that I got sick; the two kids who still live at home both had what seemed like the same cold about two weeks earlier. Maybe the only surprise was that it took me so long to get sick.
But somehow, summer colds always seem to come as a surprise. Maybe it’s just because we call these viruses “colds” that we think they should only happen in cold weather, even though it’s clear that colds are caused by viruses, not by actually being cold. Like many viral illnesses, they’re more common in the winter simply because people spend more time indoors, sharing the same air (and doorknobs, and drawer handles and faucet handles and all the other surfaces where germs hide).
It makes me wonder: Did Jesus ever get a cold?
I assume colds, which can be caused by more than 200 viruses, happened in first-century Palestine, although there is no evidence of anyone, let alone Jesus, suffering from a cold in the Scriptures. Leprosy, yes, hemorrhages, yes. The archaeological record also points to tuberculosis and dysentery, especially in crowded cities like Jerusalem.
But no one has a runny nose, or complains that their face is aching from sinus congestion. Or, for that matter, that they have a simple upset stomach.
Maybe the discomforts of such run-of-the-mill illnesses were seen as too minor to be mentioned during a time when everyday life seems to have been much less comfortable than it is now. Or maybe they were so common no one thought of recording them.
But I find comfort in the humanity of Jesus, the idea that God took on a human body, with all of its frailties, and became one of us. He ate and drank, he laughed and wept, I’m sure that as a baby, he needed to be changed.
If Jesus was like us in all things but sin, wouldn’t that include susceptibility to the infections we all get?
If Jesus did get sick, though, he would certainly be able to heal himself if he wanted to, since he was also God. He alluded to that in Luke’s Gospel, when he told the congregation in the synagogue in Nazareth that he expected them to quote the proverb, “Physician, cure yourself” (Lk 4:23) to him, although he wasn’t talking about being sick.
The rest of us, sadly, can’t do that. We’re stuck on the couch with sports or soap operas, and plenty of fluids, until we feel better.