Son of Man

Often what stops us from making progress is the fact that we understand the nature of the challenges we face incorrectly. The conceptual revolution that allowed Isaac Newton to formulate universal gravitation was that instead of deriving a law of motion based on the intrinsic qualities of the apple, Newton recognised that the apple had mass, the earth had mass and that these masses were interacting. Reality became intelligible not through individual essence but through relationship.

Newton, however, nevertheless still understood these bodies-in-relationship to be separate objects interacting across space. By the twentieth century, physicists like Richard Feynman (from whose work most of my rudimentary understanding of quantum physics is derived) began to recognise an even stranger truth. At the deepest level, what we call “particles” are not like little snooker balls moving independently through space. Instead, many physicists today would say that what we call “particles” are simply stable patterns of interaction in underlying fields. The deeper you go, the less reality looks like solid objects and the more closely it reflects relationships happening.

The revelation is not confined to physics. Here in Africa the notion that human beings are autonomous individuals is not a traditional way of understanding humanity. But the dominance of Western culture means that Western metaphysics permeate homes all over the world, so that even here in Africa we have come to understand human beings as autonomous individuals, self-determining agents with internally generated selves. We have developed the misleading habit of understanding the self through an Aristotelian lens, as a set of intrinsic qualities. But academic research in fields like sociology and psychology – not just physics – is revealing something African philosophy has long understood but sadly forgotten: the human being is not a self-contained unit who, from that point, enters into relationship. We are relational from the outset, and from that starting point the self is formed through imitation. The self, like gravity, emerges out of relationship.

If this is true of us—if our very humanity is not a fixed list of properties but a dynamic reality constituted by relationship—then what does it mean for Jesus? Our capacity to engage meaningfully with the revelation of God in Jesus has been severely curtailed by the limitations of the framework through which we have tried to understand him: that is, as a divine being who momentarily put on a human costume. What if, as for any of us, the selfhood of Jesus emerged not from any intrinsic qualities but from relationship – with the one he called Abba as well as with the communities in which he lived and moved? What might it look like to view Jesus through this different, relational lens?

One brief episode recorded in the Gospel of John offers a striking window into the question. A woman accused of adultery is brought into a public space and placed at the centre of a gathering crowd. The atmosphere is charged with moral certainty. Religious authority, social anxiety and the contagious energy of collective judgement converge around her. The community stands on the brink of a familiar solution: stability restored through the exposure and elimination of a transgressor.

It is a scene that feels uncomfortably recognisable. Human societies have long discovered that unity can be forged in opposition to a common enemy. Shared outrage can bind people together with remarkable speed. Stones can pass from hand to hand with an almost gravitational inevitability.

But Jesus does not respond by entering the debate on its own terms. He does not immediately pronounce judgement or offer a legal counter-argument. Instead, he bends down and begins to write on the ground. The gesture is enigmatic, but its effect is unmistakable. The escalating rhythm of accusation is interrupted. Time slows. Attention shifts. Those who moments before were united in righteous indignation find themselves drawn into a more unsettling awareness of their own participation in the dynamics unfolding around them.

When Jesus finally speaks, his words do not simply resolve the situation; they transform it. The crowd disperses. The woman remains. What has been restored is not merely her safety, but her personhood within the fragile web of human relationships. The crisis is not resolved trough the application of power but by the reconfiguration of how people stand in relation to one another.

I think sometimes we are too quick to interpret eth gospels in the light of Jesus’s divinity. So before we rush to interpret the theological significance of the scene, let our thoughts linger on what it reveals about humanity. Here, in compressed form, we glimpse the relational forces that so often govern our lives: imitation, fear, the longing for moral clarity, the relief that comes when blame can be assigned to someone else. Identity is being shaped in real time through participation in a collective drama.

Yet Jesus inhabits the same relational field without capitulating to its destructive momentum. His presence introduces a different pattern of response: the restoration of relationship rather than the satisfaction of outrage. The story suggests that what is at stake is not simply the fate of one woman, but the possibility of another way of being human.

I do not believe it is accidental that when Jesus speaks about himself, he most often does so in terms that emphasise shared humanity. His preferred self-designation, “the Son of Man,” sounds mysterious to modern ears, but in its original linguistic setting it carries a far more ordinary resonance. It is a way of saying, quite simply, “the human one.” The phrase does carry echoes of the vision in the Book of Daniel, where a figure described as “one like a son of man” appears in contrast to the violent, beast-like empires that dominate the world’s stage. In this sense of the term, too, the emphasis falls on a mode of existence that is recognisably human yet profoundly different from the predatory patterns that shape collective life. To speak of the Son of Man is to speak of humanity as it might be when freed from the gravitational pull of rivalry and fear.

If our identities are indeed constituted through relationship, then the significance of this self-designation becomes clearer. Jesus is not presenting himself as an abstract divine visitor temporarily inhabiting a human frame. Rather, his life unfolds in continuous orientation toward the one he calls Abba, and in equally continuous engagement with the communities among whom he lives and moves. In both directions, his relationships reveal a pattern of trust, generosity and openness that stands in quiet tension with the habits of accusation and exclusion so deeply embedded in human societies.

Seen in this light, the scene in the temple courtyard is not an isolated act of compassion but a glimpse into a larger vocation. The Son of Man appears as the representative human, the one who inhabits the full complexity of our shared existence without surrendering to its most destructive impulses. His presence exposes the mechanisms through which communities maintain order at the expense of mercy, even as it hints at the possibility of a different form of life.

Maybe that is why we feel more comfortable removing him from us – scapegoating him, in a sense – by insisting on his kingship, by making him safely divine and thus elevating him beyond our reach. If he is in some way fundamentally different from us, then we can, excuse ourselves from following where his humanity leads. It may be that it is easier to worship the divine in Jesus than to recognise the humanity he reveals in us.