“He became Son of man, who
was God's own Son, in order that He might make the sons of men to be children
of God. … He in nothing diminished His own Nature by this condescension, but
raised us, who had always sat in disgrace and darkness, to glory unspeakable.”
– St John Chrysostom
Christmas is over, sort of – the 12 days extend
until the Feast of Epiphany on Jan. 6 for Western Christians, and Eastern
Christians’ Christmas is coming up on Jan. 7.
For
most of us in the United States, we’re recovered from our food comas and family
gatherings, mostly headed back to work, and looking into the new year.
For
churches things get pretty low key until Ash Wednesday, Lent, and Easter, the
most important holiday and central event of the liturgical year. The connection between Christmas and Easter
seems to be mostly a technicality for many American Christians: Jesus had to be
born so he could die – okay, done, let’s move on.
What
we celebrate on Christmas – the Incarnation, God becoming a human being – is
important all year long, especially for Jesus’ death and resurrection we
celebrate at Eastertime. The Incarnation
undergirds all of Jesus’ ministry, His dying and rising, and the life of His
people from then until all eternity.
I’m
not sure we reflect on this enough.
When
we do so, however, we push the limits of our human understandings of God and
His work in the world, running up against what theologians refer to as mysteries
of our faith. In The Orthodox Way,
Kallistos Ware writes,
In the Christian context, we do not mean by a
“mystery” merely that which is baffling and mysterious, an enigma or insoluble
problem. A mystery is, on the contrary, something that is revealed for our
understanding, but which we never understand exhaustively because it
leads into the depth or the darkness of God. The eyes are closed—but they are
also opened.
Drawing
from Scripture, Christian theology has long understood the incarnate Jesus to
have two distinct natures: he is both fully God and fully human. Needless to say, how that works definitely
qualifies as a mystery, and so does what that means for us – not fully hidden
but not fully comprehensible either.
I
want to talk about Jesus as God incarnate in three ways:
1. Jesus as God’s Word
2. Jesus as victor over sin
and death
3. Jesus as the union of God
and humanity
Each
forms a key part of God’s all-encompassing
work of redemption, transformation, and reconciliation.
Jesus
as God’s Word
The Gospel of John begins with a reference to
Jesus as God’s Word, using the Greek word logos, indicating a
message or organizing principle:
In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made
that was made. In him was life,
and the life was the light of men.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt
among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from
the Father, full of grace and truth.
No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at
the Father's side, he has made him known. (John 1:1-5, 14, 18)
Thinking
about Jesus as God’s Word to us encompasses the whole of His life and ministry. That’s a lot to try to summarize, but Jesus
Himself spoke constantly about it in terms of “the kingdom of God”, a renewed
world both coming in the future and here now and being accomplished in His
person and by the community of followers He established. It turns the existing order of the world
upside down: the first will be last and the last will be first, people are
called to love their enemies and pray for their persecutors, and true leadership
means becoming everyone else’s servant.
Not only did Jesus preach these things, but He lived them by honoring
the poor and the outcasts, healing the sick and the handicapped, and willingly
laying down His life for the salvation of others.
Jesus
as Victor over Sin and Death
God sent His Son Jesus to die and rise from the
dead in order to save humanity from sin, death, and hell and to give us
everlasting life with Himself.
The
Incarnation is an inseparable part of that mission.
Hebrews
2:14-17 says,
Since therefore the children share in flesh and
blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through
death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is,
the devil, and deliver all those who through fear
of death were subject to lifelong slavery. For surely it is not angels that he helps, but
he helps the offspring of Abraham.
Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every
respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high
priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.
St
Augustine puts it this way:
We need a Mediator who, united to us here below by the mortality of His body, should at the same time be able to give us truly divine help in cleansing and liberating us by means of the immortal righteousness of His spirit, whereby He remained heavenly even while here on earth.
Just
how we understand this depends somewhat on how we understand the idea of
atonement, i.e. how Jesus deals with sin and death on our behalf. Most American Evangelicals hold to what’s
known as the penal substitutionary theory that understands atonement in
terms of a courtroom scenario in which human beings are guilty of sin, subject
to God’s wrath, and must be punished, but Jesus saves us by being punished for
our sins instead. The Incarnation
facilitates this in that only a perfect and sinless human being can be
substituted to sinful human beings, and therefore, Jesus required a human body
in which to sacrifice Himself.
Evangelicals
tend to assume that penal substitution is THE biblical understanding of atonement,
but it’s largely a product of the Reformation in the Western Church’s reinterpretation
of St Anselm of Canterbury’s eleventh-century satisfaction theory of
atonement.
Before
this in the West and still today in the Eastern Churches, the predominant (but
not only) theories of atonement are the closely related Christus Victor
(Christ Victorious) and ransom theories, both of which see the defeat of
sin, death, and the devil as powers that enslave humanity and keep it from God as
the work of atonement, rather than the satisfaction of an angry deity. In these views, it is only immortal God
wrapped in mortal flesh who can bind us to Himself, die our deaths, and raise
us spiritually and bodily with Him in His immortal life.
Whichever
way you understand Christ’s work of atonement, the Incarnation is at its root.
Jesus
as the Union of God and Humanity
Jesus’ binding us to Himself in His death and
resurrection is not only to accomplish a one-time purpose, it’s both the
beginning of a relationship and image of a future reality. Like in the end of the book of Revelation,
God dwells with His people, joining heaven and earth together.
But
in the relationship that God establishes in Christ, He not only dwells with
humanity, we are also somehow joined as one in a relationship that can
only be described as full of mystery.
Jesus even describes this relationship between God and human beings as
being like the relationship between the very persons of the Trinity.
In
the Gospel of John, Jesus tells His disciples,
Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in
my Father, and you in me, and I in you. (14:19b-20)
Later
He prays to God the Father,
I do not ask for these only, but also for
those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one,
just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be
in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have
given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you
in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know
that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. (17:20-23)
According
to 2 Peter 1:4, through Christ we become “partakers of the divine nature”.
Eastern
Orthodox theologians think of this in terms of theosis, humans themselves becoming in some sense divine. In the second century, St Irenaeus speaks of “the
Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love,
become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.”
The
indwelling of “you in Me and I in you” doesn’t quite sound like the
relationship we see in Genesis to me.
But that’s not all:
In
a sermon on the “Word made flesh” in John 1:14 (see above), St John Chrysostom
makes an observation I don’t know if I had really thought much about
before:
And observe I pray you, the awful and ineffable
nature of the mystery. He inhabits this tabernacle forever, for He clothed
Himself with our flesh, not as again to leave it, but always to have it with
Him.
That
blows my mind a little bit. This is
something beyond just taking away humanity’s sins and returning us to a
previously lost state of being, this is a new and permanent reality.
This
is not just a remaking of the Garden of Eden, this is the building of something
greater yet. It actually makes me wonder
if there still would have been an Incarnation if sin never came into the
world. Maybe we were never meant to
exist in some static state and instead made to move ever further into the life
of God. Here again, though, we run up
against a great mystery.
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