The Word became Flesh

This Christmas season, as is appropriate, I have been meditating on the wondrousness that is the Incarnation. And the more I think about it, the more amazing it is. That God, the Creator of the universe, would care for his rebellious children, who actively destroy themselves, each other and the creation they were made stewards of on a regular basis, and care for the so much that he left Heaven, that He sent His Word, which is Himself, to the creation, to become a part of that creation by being born into that creation by a creature that he made, to live as one of those creatures and then to be killed.

This is love beyond comprehension. The all-knowing, all-powerful Creative Word bound himself to mortal, sinful flesh. He let Himself be bound in space and time, who made space and time, to a single cell, that grew into a bundle of cells, which attached itself to the flesh of a woman, and grew to be a tiny, fragile, powerless baby. The Word that separated the light from the darkness, who called forth creation from the depths of chaos, who breathed life into humanity, bound himself to 8 pounds of water and protein and bone and fat that could neither move nor speak.



Was he aware? As fully God while fully human, was the Godhead conscious of his own limitations as an infant? He would have gone into it knowing what it would mean, but did the Word consciously experience the powerlessness of infancy? Or did it take on a kind of unknowing, suppressing its knowledge and power for the sake of its new body's limitations? In a way it does not matter, because either way is an incredible act of sacrifice. Adults can barely stand by and watch as young children flounder to learn things. How maddening would we find it to be trapped in a toddler's body, knowing everything we know as an adult, but having to learn again how to speak, how to use a spoon, how to run without falling?

Christ is the binding of the eternal and perfect to the temporary and flawed. The perfectly just, perfectly merciful, perfectly loving God chose to live among creatures who are none of these things, as one who felt all the temptation to be unjust, to be vengeful, to be selfish and hating. And He continued to choose justice, mercy and love.

And I think we find that kind of threatening. Christ as God-Made-Man challenges us as modern Christians in a way that we find uncomfortable.  Christ as God we feel equipped to handle. We are excellent at dragging divinity down to our level. But Christ as Man, this Jesus person, we don't like. The humanity which God takes on at Christmastime and redeems at Easter is threatening in a way which deity is not. We are not deities, even if we construct ourselves and others as idols. But we are human, and very flawed humans. And I think that we are not entirely certain that we like being human any more.

We think we like being human. We create words like 'humane' and ideas like 'human rights' that try to elevate the idea of humanness, but at the same time we are no longer sure what 'human' means, or if we really want to be that. In science fiction and fantasy, readers identify with the characters that are not human more than the humans. Or if they are human, they are improved humans. Mr. Spock with his logic and rejection of violence and hatred, the suppression of his emotions. Jedi with their ability to tap into a supernatural Force and bend lesser humans to their will. Hobbits and elves in Lord of the Rings and wizards in Harry Potter, even the latest vampire craze. I think that we are drawn to the idea of being not-human, of losing all the baggage that we've created for ourselves with the term, and all the pain of not knowing what it is to be human apart from God.

So God becoming fully human is a threat. He became one of us and did better. He did everything that we cannot do as one of us, subject to all our flaws and temptations. He got sick, stubbed his toe, burned his tongue on a hot drink. He was a teenager and never disrespected his parents. He was a guy with eyes, he saw pretty women and didn't lust. He saw the diseased and disfigured, the sinners and the tax collectors, the beautiful and the ugly, the people who were trying to do right and the people who didn't care. He interacted with that one crazy lady at synagogue who manages to drive you nuts just by looking at you, and the guy who never seemed to bathe. And he loved them all, as we know we can't.

God's enfleshment, his humanity insults us more than his divinity, even though it is supposed to give us hope. We forget that, by coming as a part of the creation, he was able to redeem creation, not as some deus-ex-machina display of power, sweeping in from off stage to cut the gordian knot of a plot. He entered as a character, playing a bit part, Carpenter #23934, and completed the critical action as a character. The play is not yet over, and so it is hard still to see how it will end, how that one weekend execution in Palestine 2000 years ago was the turning point.

We should be clinging to God's humanity because in coming as one of us, and doing better, He proved to us that it could be done, and gave us a glimpse of what we should be, and of what we will be when the work is done. The Word made flesh is awesome and awful beyond comprehension, and it is unspeakably wonderful.

Merry Christmas!