Incarnation
Read time: 6.5 minutes
“It is the divine that takes the lead in changing places”.*
Take a moment for those words sink in.
We naturally look heavenward for God. We wonder that as transcendent and beyond imagining as God is, how can God be “involved” with this tiny speck of rock in the vastness of the universe?
“Most religions grapple with the problem of a divine being distant from humanity, Christianity addresses this issue with its foundational belief: the Incarnation.”[2]
God created the universe; created this world and all that’s in it. God created us. The question through the ages: Why?
If God needed worship and adoration, God could simply create more angels; we are too easily distracted.
If God needed workers to do God’s will or defend God’s honour, we often prove ourselves a poor choice. Surely an omniscient God would know we’d worship distractedly, adore all the wrong things, and defend our own egos!
God gave us free will to choose God’s way or our own. Our human story contains beautiful examples of God-inspired acts of great compassion, love and self-sacrifice, but our weakness and zealous extremes[3] add many chapters of our devastating failure to follow the Great Commandment: to love God and one another.
In our search for purity and perfection, we can’t believe we’ll find it here because we see what we do to others and even ourselves — and that begs a valid question: Where is God in all the tragedy of humanity?
Our human reasoning answers that if there is a God, God is aloof and ‘up there’ while we are ‘down here’. So, we need to pray to heaven in order to get into heaven.
Yet, the Incarnation proves that God’s ways are far beyond ours. The Incarnation disproves our logic in the most shocking and profound way. God becomes one of us.
Jesus, The Incarnation, is the ‘God with skin on’ that we can see, born into all that humanity is: vulnerable, naked, dependent.[4]
The Incarnation is, ‘The Big Step’. God moves from Critical Spectator to Ultimate Participant.[5]
Creator becomes ‘created’ — the timeless steps into time — the transcendent transcends divinity.
God sheds the perfection of divinity to wear the weakness of humanity not so that God can experience humanity, but so that humanity can experience God. “It is the divine that takes the lead in changing places.”*
The Incarnation is unique among world religions. To others, God is too pure and sublimely ‘other-world’ for direct involvement with sinful humanity.
But for Christianity, God is love (1Jn 4: 8,16] — and love will do anything and everything for the sake of love.
That is the unfathomable difference between an observer-God and a God that chooses to be involved with us; a God that lives among us, lives with us, feels our pain, celebrates our joys.
Accepting the God that chooses involvement with us makes an equally enormous difference in our relationship with God.
It’s the difference between being told you are loved, and absorbing love offered and demonstrated. Words often bounce off the armour of our ego. Feeling the personal cost of love subverts our defenses and finds entrance into our soul. It transforms us.
We grow by allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by a God who puts flesh to love and becomes human.
The origin and image in which we are created, the engine which keeps us breathing, the goal towards which we are drawn… is love.
As we look to heaven, God is here.
We look for the magic of miracles, when every breath we take is a miracle.
We look to Saints, relics, and holy places, when God is within each of us.
God’s message to us in the Incarnation is that God is not aloof and removed — God’s message is that God cares enough to become human, because it is good to be human.
We see a baby in a manger and we overflow with wonder. The all-powerful Creator comes to us as an innocent and vulnerable infant. Our minds are confounded by the contradiction — and rightly so. God challenges all our preconceptions and turns each one of them upside down.
Emmanuel. God with us — with us in a way that only works with acceptance because it is impossible to comprehend.
Come let us adore.
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* Rohr, Richard “The Universal Christ” (New York, NY: Convergent Books, 2021. p.119)
[2] https://open.substack.com/pub/culturecritic/p/how-christianity-shaped-art?r=9sycm&utm_medium=ios Accessed: August 30, 2024
[3] The Crusades, the Inquisition, Islamic extremism… are a few examples.
[4] Heb 4:15. “For the high priest we have is not incapable of feeling our weaknesses with us, but has been put to the test in exactly the same way as ourselves, apart from sin.”
[5] Phil 1: 6-7 “Who, being in the form of God, did not count equality with God something to be grasped. But he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, becoming as human beings are; and being in every way like a human being,