The carols have been sung, the presents are all unwrapped, the delectable Christmas dinner is now leftovers, the family and friends are either back home or heading back home today, my Lakers were soundly humiliated by the Cavs, and dear old St. Nick is probably off resting on a beach in the South Pacific. Christmas is once again past. And yet, something of Christmas remains: The “Christ” in Christmas. The precious babe in the manger. The Messiah has come. Yes, he is still in his infancy, but He has come. And the world as we know it is no longer and will no longer be the same. For in this One something unique has toppled the foundation of “the norm.”
The gospel of John speaks of this One who has come into being among us as “monogenes.” Unique. Unparalleled in being. “And the Logos became flesh and tabernacled among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as the unique son of the father, full of grace and truth.” (1.14) John here unveils the key peculiarity of the Christ child and shocks the hearer of his gospel. The One God who creates and sustains everything; the One God whose presence fills the cosmos – this One enfleshes himself. As Paul puts it, the Lord became poor for our sakes so that by his poverty, we may become rich (2 Corinthians 8.9). Or, as Paul says in another of his great meditations on the incarnation, the Lord, though in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross. (Philippians 2.5-11) We accept this “enfleshment” as fact, particularly as we meditate upon the Christ child during our Christmas celebrations. But I often let the significance of the incarnation – the point of it all – pass me by. I guess I am to used to the idea. But the ludicrousness of God becoming human should remain shocking to us. And God’s rationale behind the whole thing should shock us even more!
So, what is the meaning of Christmas? Or, what are the implications of incarnation?
(1) God assumes humanity.
The good news of Christmas is that through the young maiden, Mary, God “assumes” humanity. God “tabernacles among us” as a human being. God elects himself for humiliation, coming among His own as an infant, completely vulnerable and new. God comes among us at the beginning of human experience so that he may reflect his glory through every stage of human experience. God becomes enfleshed, and it is not mere appearance. The babe in the manger is the fullness of God. From the beginning, Christians have proclaimed nearly univocally that in the child in the manger we have the fullness of human being and the fullness of divine being held together beyond human comprehension in a divine-human unity. This One is the God-Man.
But God “assuming” humanity does not mean that he simply takes on the form of humanity. This is not God simply parading around in a human body. No. In becoming human, God takes on the fullness of the human estate in its brokenness and tragedy. The Christ child is and will become a person with absolute integrity, showing the fullness of human being, manifesting the range of human needs, passions and emotions – even unto death. An early Christian teaching tried to preserve ancient categories of being by declaring that God did not actually “assume” human flesh in the incarnation, but was an apparition of sorts. That is, God played some sort of trickery. He appeared in the Christ child, and what appeared real to people was not actually human but a convincingly human divine presence. The earliest Christians rightly rejected this understanding, knowing that if the Messiah was only apparently with us, the radical nature of the enfleshed God would be lost in its impact upon humanity.
Likewise, the earliest Christians also rejected the “hippie Jesus.” That is, they rejected the notion that Jesus was divine humanity, or sunnum bonum of human beings. They rejected any sense of a purely moral understanding of the Christ child, whose work it was to purely represent a good example for all to follow. Christians for centuries affirmed the absolute divinity of the incarnate One. God is fully present in this One without abandoning his Being and character.
God’s assumption of humanity affirms, then, that God comes among us without losing an iota of who He is, and in his assumption, exalts us as He pulls us back into fellowship with Himself.
(2) God must be re-examined and re-understood
Christmas also means that we need to revisit our understanding of God. When God comes into the world in the arms of the lowliest of women in the lowliest of places, our divine categories find that they need fine tuning. First, the locus of God’s concern is highly provincial, unsuspectedly poor and socially radical. God shows up where we never imagine that he would be: In a manger in a far off province with a young, poor and highly suspect couple? By that nature of his coming, God reinvents our categories for God. Second, the language of God’s being and character now needs some serious work. Prior to Christmas our words are simple: One God without division or rival. In the light of Jesus and, particularly, of his language, we must return to square one. Here is one who speaks of his “Father’s house” as the Temple. Here is One who promises a comforter to his followers. Somewhere between the Fatherhood of God, the Presence and Power of the Spirit, and the existence of the human Messiah as God’s Son, a new way of describing God emerges. This new, developing language of Trinity takes hundreds of years for the earliest Christian communities to work out and, in some ways, we are still working with this Reality, trying to articulate its due.
In light of Christmas, therefore, we call into question our presuppositions about God. We re-examine the carefully constructed categories we use to shackle God into and out of arenas of our existence, whether personal or social. We begin to speak of God as a fellowship. We say that God is a loving inter-relationship of true persons. We look to God in this sense as the forerunner of the fullness of our creaturely relationships. We speak of divine interdependence of that father on the son and the spirit, and see that there is no neediness within God because God is self-fulfilling. Because the father, son and spirit uphold one another in love and support each other’s work without fail and with integrity, God is free and God is able to be an outpouring of love through all of God’s actions. As we look to the child and then look to the fullness of the divine being, we catch a glimpse of God’s generosity and his overwhelming grace toward His creatures and begs all of our questions of “why?” and “how?” God, in this renewed understanding, begins to assume us in another sense, in His majesty, beauty and wonder. And in the same way we are in awe of the one in the manger, we are in awe of the One in the manger.
(3) The categories of Being and Time must be revisited
Taking things a bit further, Christmas calls us to not only reunderstand our position relative to God and, therefore, understand God himself, but, finally, we must examine the very nature of who we are and what our purposes are in our existence. If God assumes humanity in Jesus Christ, and if the God revealed there is radically interpersonal and loving toward humanity, then it changes who I perceive myself to be and, therefore, my position in the world. When we peer into the eyes of the Christ child, how do you see yourself reflected back? Who are you in the eyes of God? The answer of God is “beloved.” Will we receive this response? And if we do, how will it impact who we are? And how will this Word impact what we do? Christmas calls us to re-evaluate the basic categories of “being” and “time.” It is the classic jazz philosopher’s dilemma: do-be-do-be-do-be-do. The great thing about being God is that God has absolute integrity. God is his activity. There is no confusion or separation between being and time for God. For us, this is simply not the case. This is part of the broken state of humanity. Yet, the gospel of John reminds us that the unique one came to bring “eternal life.” And by eternal life John does not mean “heaven.” John means a quality of existence that is not unlike the way of being exhibited by God. The shock of Christmas, then, calls me to question: Who am I? Christmas calls me to re-examine myself as one whose humanity is assumed by God. Who is fellowshipped by God. Who is embraced in my humanity (in all of its failings) by the Creator of the cosmos. The reassessment expands my self-understanding in a way that reflects the generosity and humility of God reflected back in Philippians.
And this affects Time. Time remains a metric by which we organize human existence. The Messiah comes in a particular time. However, the very nature of that time is radicalized by the Christ child. The mundane is cracked open and expanded. We find space, now, in our existence to get out of the rat race, to overcome our schedules, to allow ourselves to be open to God’s inbreaking into our existence. Whereas we would say, we have no time for A or B, the Christ child impresses himself upon us in glory. And, as we have done this past week, we stop the press of events and find space in our existence to see beyond ourselves (I hope) to the reality that is greater and truer than the minutiae of our experience. In this experience, we are changed forever, just as were those first who visited the Christ child. Who we are and what we do can never be the same: all things are made new!
(4) In Sum
The incarnation shakes our worlds, rocks our foundations and (hopefully) awakens us to Reality.
John of Damascus (7th century): “The Son of God became man in order that He might again grace man as He had when He made him. For He had made him to His own image, understanding and free, and to His own likeness, that is to say, as perfect in virtues as it was possible for human nature to be, for these virtues are, as it were characteristics of the divine nature – freedom from care and annoyance, integrity, goodness, wisdom, justice, freedom from all vice. Thus, He put man in communion with Himself…. But, since by transgressing the commandment we obscured and canceled out the characteristics of the divine image, we were given over to evil and stripped of the divine communion…. But, since He had shared with us what was better and we had not kept it, He now takes His share of what is worse, of our nature I mean to say, that through Himself and in Himself He may restore what was to His image and what was to His likeness.” (Oden, 105-106; quot. OF IV.4, FC37, pp. 337-38)
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