Jesus Did Not Grow Old in This World

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — September 13, 1735

Christians often say that Jesus understands everything we go through because Hebrews says he was tempted in all things as we are. That idea carries comfort, but it also raises a hard question. Jesus knew pain, betrayal, fear, humiliation, torture, and execution under state power. He knew what it meant to be abandoned, mocked, and crushed by an empire. But he did not grow old in a society that measures human worth by productivity.

That matters more than many Christians admit.

Jesus did not have to face the slow social death that comes with aging in a modern system. He did not live long enough to be told, directly or indirectly, that he was no longer useful. He did not have to sit in a room and feel the world moving on without him because he was old, sick, tired, poor, or no longer profitable. He did not have to watch society sort people into categories of economic value and throw the rest aside.

That is one of the sharpest forms of cruelty in the modern world. It is not always dramatic. Sometimes it comes quietly. A person is ignored. Their grief becomes inconvenient. Their loneliness becomes invisible. Their labor is taken when they are strong, and their existence becomes a burden when they are weak. Society does not always crucify people in public. Sometimes it just leaves them behind.

None of that means Christ understands nothing about human suffering. It means Christians should be more honest about what the comparison does and does not cover. He knew injustice in its rawest form. He knew what it was to be at the mercy of violent authority. He knew what it meant to suffer without deserving it. He knew what it meant to be betrayed by friends and condemned by a political system that protected itself first. Those things are real. They are not small.

But growing old carries its own humiliations, and many of them are specific to the kind of society we have built. A person can survive youth, work, family strain, illness, and loss, only to discover that age itself becomes a mark against them. That is not ancient Rome. That is us. That is modern life. And it is worth asking why societies that loudly claim the name of Christ still treat so many people as disposable.

The deeper problem is not that Jesus failed to experience every detail of modern life. The deeper problem is that people who claim to follow him have accepted a world that discards the weak, the grieving, the elderly, and the unwanted. They speak of love, mercy, and human dignity while serving systems that rank lives by usefulness. That contradiction is not minor. It is central.

Christ did not end Roman brutality. The state still kills. Power still protects itself. Public cruelty still exists. Injustice still wears a uniform and often escapes punishment. Anyone pretending that the teachings of Jesus erased human barbarism has not been paying attention. The point was never that evil disappeared. The point was that humanity was given a standard by which evil could be judged.

That standard remains, and modern society fails it every day.

So the real question is not whether Jesus understands every detail of old age in a disposable culture. The real question is why a civilization that claims to honor him still builds itself around disposability in the first place. That is the indictment. Not of Christ, but of us.

For more from Cliff Potts, see https://cliffpotts.org

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References

The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version. (1989). National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.