N.T. Wright, the widely read biblical scholar and former Anglican bishop, captures its import by noting that the Gospels do not cast Jesus as “parachuting down from a great height to dispense solutions to all problems nor zapping everything into shape like some kind of Superman.”
Rather, Wright observes in his book “Simply Good News,” Christ is shown as “living in the mess and muddle of a very difficult part of the world at an especially difficult moment in its history and absorbing the pain and the shame of it all within his own life, within his own body.