Sure, Jesus was an incredible teacher. As a moral example, He is unsurpassed. In humility, you will find no equal.
But the foundational block upon all of this was His incarnation. This was and is, after all, the Son of God. And this Son of God came down to earth to reach across my sin and shame and save me as I called out to Him.
C. S. Lewis, in his book Miracles writes: “In the Christian story, God descends to re-ascend. He comes down, down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity, down to the very roots and seed bed of the humanity which He Himself created. But He goes down to come up again and bring ruined sinners up with Him.”
He gives this illustration: “One has the picture of a strong man, stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath some great complicated burden, he must stoop in order to lift. He must almost disappear under the load before he incredibly straightens his back and marches off with the whole mass swaying on his shoulders. Or one may think of a diver, first reducing himself to nakedness, then glancing in mid air, then gone with a splash, vanished, rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water, down through increasing pressure into the death-like region of ooze and slime and old decay. And then up again, back to color and light, his lungs almost bursting till suddenly he breaks the surface again holding in his hand the dripping precious thing that he went down to recover. He and it are both colored now that they have come up into the light. Down below where it lay colorless in the dark, he lost his color, too.”
“The doctrine of the incarnation is emphatically at the center of Christianity, that the Son of God came down... No seed ever fell so far from a tree into so dark and cold a soil as the Son of God did.”
That's as good a way to illustrate Jesus' incarnation as any I have ever heard.
