Did Jesus Get Colds?

Lea McCarthy ponders the mission of the suffering Christ and what that may have meant for Him during His earthly life.

Take Up Your Little Annoying Cross

We are well into the great season of Lent, a gift that the Church gives us to prepare our hearts for the triumph of Christ over death and sin at Easter. Lent is a time to take up our crosses and follow Him (and let’s hope we aren’t dragging our crosses, kicking and screaming all the way). I always think of big penances as being the most excellent, such as giving up coffee (oh, no!), secular music, or TV shows. Not that those aren’t good sacrifices, I just often forget that the small crosses we don’t voluntarily choose matter too. If Jesus spent a day in my shoes, I bet you He wouldn’t pass over opportunities like tending to a sick child, tax season, leaky faucets, or an incontinent cat. He would offer up these annoyances mindfully and be united to the Father in His offering.

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When I was younger, I believed Jesus enjoyed many privileges because of His divinity: for instance, that He never got colds. Germs would have recognized the One who ruled all creation and not dared to so much as THINK about causing problems. He would never have had the miserable experience of being laid low by the flu on whatever equivalent they had to couches in those days. He would have perfect health in mind and body, and been spared from all the annoyances of fallen humanity, I imagined.

After all, some Catholic saints believed that Mary may not have experienced the pain of labor since she was free from original sin and its effects. It made sense to me that Jesus would have similarly coasted above the masses on a thermal of divinity, one of us but carefully guarded from the everyday problems that we suffer as the result of sin.

The Mission of the Suffering Messiah

But is that what Jesus came to do? Did He descend into our misery like a rich man borrowing a beggar’s cloak for a day to get the experience, all the while retaining the means to be warm and well fed? On the contrary; though He had unlimited power as God, Jesus deigned to make Himself powerless to truly become one of us in all our sufferings. He didn’t live His life cushioned by angels and padded by Divine intervention when things started to get a little uncomfortable (except, of course, during His Passion). Isaiah prophesied this:

He was spurned and avoided by men, a man of suffering, knowing pain,
Like one from whom you turn your face, spurned, and we held him in no esteem. (Isaiah 53:3)

Clearly, Jesus was no stranger to suffering throughout His life, and He did it for us.

It was our pain that he bore, our sufferings he endured. (Isaiah 53:4a)

Consider the circumcision that the infant Jesus was subject to when He was eight days old. That procedure is incredibly painful, even in modern times with analgesics and needle-sharp instruments! How much more so many years in the past? And what about the other ordeals that other children go through that we mothers know so well, such as teething discomfort and falling down when learning to walk?

Growing up in the small town of Nazareth where everybody knows everybody, there must have been times when Jesus overheard a disparaging remark about the circumstances of His birth, Mary’s character, or Joseph’s decision to take her into his home after the supposed scandal of her pregnancy. How that must have sorrowed His heart, knowing how holy his parents were and yet He couldn’t say anything to clear their names.

We know Jesus’ family was poor, because his parents sacrificed a pair of turtle doves in the temple, the alternative offering for a poor man (Luke 2:24). How poor they were, we have no details about, but it would not be too great a stretch of the imagination to think that Jesus may have at times gone to bed hungry. If it came down to deciding who was going to eat and who was going to tighten the belt, His parents (like any good parents) would have gone without food themselves and gave the little food they had for that meal to their Son. If those circumstances had occurred, He would have suffered knowing His loved ones were suffering from hunger. He had to do without, not only luxuries but sometimes even necessities.

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So, did Jesus get colds? There is no official Church teaching that says you have to believe He did or didn’t. (I would love to see the title of that papal document!) You are free to believe He never missed a day of work in His life or suffered a headache. But it seems that in light of the Scripture, Jesus truly entered into all of our suffering, not just the major things like the Passion, but the dumb, human stuff like smashing His thumb with a hammer.

He gets it. He’s been there Himself, and He did it to reclaim us for Heaven and free us from even these small sufferings on earth below.

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