Thinking about the Humanity of Jesus

This lent thing is a difficult concept to grasp. I have given up coffee for lent(for those of you not so acquainted with me, I am pretty serious about my coffee - dark roast, preferably from Ethiopia or Sumatra and I am a big believer in fair trade coffees - why should the rest of the world subsidize my drinking habit?)Giving things up in our culture is not a popular thing to do. So Jesus giving up the position, power and prerogative of being divine for being human must have been a problem. Most of us have a difficult time getting our heads around Jesus being fully human and fully divine, so we do what has been done for at 2000 years (after all most of us are not very original) ay he was fully God, just masquerading as a human. The most popular or common form of this belief was called Docetism. It is the belief, (considered heretical), that Jesus did not have a physical body; rather, that his body was an illusion, as was his crucifixion. This belief is most commonly attributed to the Gnostics, who believed that matter was evil, and hence that God would not take on a material body. A 21century way of saying this would be that Jesus was just an avatar for God.

I don't buy the avatar thing, but that isn't what I wanted to talk about. I have been trying to get my head around what Jesus must have had to give up in order to become fully human. I am a pretty limited version of the human species, and I suspect you aren’t all bells and whistles either. So what was Jesus like?

One of my favorite books is titled "Leaving Ruin". The protagonist in the book at one point sits at a table in a truck stop and is talking with Jesus - like he is really sitting there in full view. An oddly attractive thought to those of us unused to thinking of Jesus in human terms. Protagonist muses things like "hmmm, small hands for a carpenter" and "Laughs a little loud for being the savior, doesn't he?"

I for one am trying to understand what it was for Jesus to be a fully human, 1st century Jewish carpenter rabbi. I find my own limitations frustrating, what must God have thought about his humanity? did he look down at his hands and say "hmmm, small hands for the creator of the universe"