The Mystery of the Incarnation

11/29/09
The Mystery of the Incarnation
Hudson UMC
Three years ago, I celebrated my very first Advent and Christmas here at the United Methodist Church in Hudson. That first Christmas Eve, I said something that, though I still stand by what I was getting at, I will never say in quite the same way again. I said that the birth of Christ was a relatively unimportant event. What I was getting at was that we cannot separate Christmas from Good Friday, Easter and Pentecost; that is, we cannot separate the birth of Christ from His death. I still believe this is true from my heart of hearts. However, never again will I say that God being born as a weak and frail human being, taking on our brokenness, and living a real human life in our midst is unimportant, or even relatively unimportant.

Over the last few years, I have had a chance to think more carefully about what truly lies at the core of Christian faith. I have found that people can disagree about predestination, or communion, or baptism, or particular understandings about how we are saved, or how the end-times will work themselves out, and yet all of them can be honest, sincere, committed Christians who love the Lord and live their lives according to His will every day. However, I have found that this is not the case if we disagree about whether Jesus Christ really is the astonishing reality of a full divine incarnation. People who do not believe this are often wonderful people who are dedicated to making the world a better place and even use Jesus as their ultimate guide for how to do that, but, as good as this may be, it falls short of Christian faith as the church has proclaimed it for two thousand years.

And so, as the United Methodist Church, along with the church universal, proclaims that the man Jesus Christ is nothing less than the fullness of God in our midst for us and our salvation, we should think carefully about this. After all, we live in a culture where we say that Jesus is God and man, or at least that the church says that, but we do not always give it the kind of attention it deserves. It is my opinion that, if we can think about and talk about the staggering fact that God has humbled Himself to become one of us without being overwhelmed by the majesty, the power and the love of God, I think we have missed a major part of what God has done.

If we want to understand what it really means for God to have interacted with us as the man Jesus, we need to spend time understanding how God has interacted with Israel for hundreds of years. Before God called the people of Israel into existence, all the nations of the world were pagan. If God had dropped into the middle of those cultures, even if He appeared to Abraham himself, He would have been a complete enigma. How else could it be? After all, if all the cultures had pagan, polytheistic, and nature-centered understandings of God, they would have interpreted God in terms of the culture they already had and would have considered the almighty God of the universe to be just one more god they had to be afraid of and do a bunch of stuff to keep happy.

Instead, since all of the cultures were made up of sinful human beings, not a single culture in the world would lend itself for God to come into it and recreate it. So, what did God do? God called a particular man, Abraham, and had him leave his home, his family, and everything he knew behind, and had him go off into the world with no other direction other than, “I will guide you and give your descendants a great inheritance.” He was saying to Abraham, “I am going to create a new culture, starting with you. It is a culture that hears the word of the Lord, who lives, not like the other nations do, but how I call you to live.” In doing this, God began to shape human culture to be able to receive divine revelation.

In the Jewish mind, revelation is not simply the unveiling of God to human beings, though that is very important. Revelation is not complete until God has also uncovered our ears, hearts, and minds to receive that communication. What this means is that we are never factored out of the equation. God cannot reveal Himself to us without preparing our hearts to receive Him, which cannot help but have a profound impact on our lives. In order to reveal Himself to the people of Israel, He had to provide them a new form of life, new ways to think about Him, and a new way to worship that was fundamentally unlike the other nations.

There is a famous story in Jeremiah, where God tells the prophet to go down to the potter’s house and observe what happens. The potter was making a pot and, when it got out of shape or began to be spoiled, the potter would creatively reshape it, “as it seemed good to him,” and brought it back into line with his plans. This is what happened in Israel for hundreds of years. Every time the people drifted away from God, every time they tried to be like their neighbors, every time they began to take things into their own hands, God would lovingly bring them back, sending prophets to deliver His word to the people so that they might take a look at their lives and return to Him. This was a long and painful process as the Israelite culture was painstakingly shaped so that they might ever more understand what God was saying to them. One great theologian said that it was through this kind of process that God “hammered out” the “basic concepts we Christians use” on “the anvil of Israel.”

This is something that we need to remember, because I think that what we want, because we live in a consumer culture, is something we can acquire or something we can do that we can check off a list and be done with it. It is as if we want something like spiritual goods and services which we can consume, be it by going to church or living the right kind of life, or even serving on a committee or two. However, this is not how God meets us. God meets us in an embodied way that transforms us so that every single aspect of our lives is impacted. We learn from the history of God’s people that we cannot even receive God’s revelation unless we allow God to reshape, not only the way we live, but the way we think. It is for precisely this reason that many of the early Methodists did not have conversion experiences until they had spent a year in small groups, learning the life of a Christian.

So, it was only after God had taken hundreds of years, painfully molding and shaping the culture of Israel, that people would be able to make sense out of an actual Incarnation of God. Finally, now that they had lived the sacrificial life, had learned that God’s will for humanity is fundamentally opposed to any human-generated way of doing things, they were finally ready for God to take the next step and enter into their midst.

Though God had spent so much time preparing the Jews for His coming, when Jesus was actually born and God lived among the people, many of the Jews rejected their Messiah and persecuted the church. This was not because they were bad people, but because they were good theologians. They knew that God was utterly transcendent, that is, above and beyond anything they could ever think. If this was the case, it seemed completely blasphemous and evil to worship a man as God. This is precisely what the church was doing at the time and precisely what the church does today. We worship the man Jesus as if He were God, because we truly believe that He is.

The problem with this way of looking at things is that it presupposes that God can do nothing new and surprising. Most of the very first Christians were also Jewish. They knew that God was transcendent and that they were not free to probe into the mystery of God, and yet, when they were brought face to face with this man, who was crucified and yet raised from the dead, they could not stop themselves from falling at His feet and crying out, along with Thomas, “My Lord and my God.” They knew that a man who is merely a man could never do what Jesus had done. When the Holy Spirit was poured out on the church at Pentecost fifty days after the resurrection, and the very same God that lived among them as Jesus of Nazareth took up residence in their own lives, the apostles could not stay silent, but they felt compelled to declare this Jesus, though a man, as the fullness of God.

The idea that God would become a human being did not only rub against the grain of the Jews, but also of the Gentiles. Greek thought prioritized seeing over hearing and immediately thought in terms of what they saw. It is no coincidence that Greek philosophy almost always said that what was really real was somehow beyond us and we should think about this ”ideal plane” in terms of what we can see and touch in our lives.

This kind of thinking does not allow for the radical reinterpreting that God did throughout the history of Israel or as Jesus. God has continually shown us that we simply cannot read our daily experience back into Him but must allow Him to reinterpret our daily experience. If we take our daily life and read it into God, we try to shape God into our own image, one of the most serious sins. When God became a man, it was not a “projection of the human into the divine, but” a “projection of the divine into the human.”

Also, the Greeks believed that, since God is perfect and human beings are not perfect, God simply could not become a human. They said that, if God became a human, God would be corrupted. And yet, this is not what we see in the life of Jesus, is it? We see Jesus touching lepers, dead bodies, and all kinds of unclean people. And yet, though the law says that He should become unclean, what do we see? We see Jesus not only not becoming unclean, but actually cleansing those He touched. It is because of this that Athanasius, one of the greatest thinkers in all of Christian history, argued that, when God becomes a man, God is not corrupted, but humanity is saved from its corruption, and this is precisely what the Good News of Jesus Christ really is.

As the sermon title says, though there are many things that we can say about the Incarnation of God as Jesus, there are other things that we cannot say, there are limits to our knowledge. And yet, as we come ever closer to celebrating the birth of the one who is both God and man, we should think about some of the significance of this amazing event.

Because God became a human being in our midst, it says certain things about our world. It means that, even on the days we feel that everything is going wrong, at it often feels that way these days, it is worth saving. Not only is it worth saving in the abstract, but God has acted decisively to actually save it, limiting Himself, suffering and dying for us helpless sinners. Before Jesus walked the earth, we could say that God had compassion on the world, but we would not have known what it meant. There are many people who have compassion on poor people and want to stand in solidarity with people who live below the poverty line, but very few people are willing to actually move to the poor parts of town, to live in the inner city, and to make a difference in a close and personal way. This is, in many ways, what God has actually done. He has not only had strong feelings for us who desperately needed the grace of God to transform us, He has actually joined with us in our condition, becoming one of us and one with us.

You know what? If God had only stood in solidarity with us and suffered our death in our place so we could have pie in the sky when we die, it would have been enough, but that is not all that God has done. God has always been a Trinity of persons joined together in perfect unity. However, after the Incarnation, one of those persons, the Word of God, the Son of God, became utterly joined to human nature. This union is so intense, personal, and complete that we are not able to separate what is human in Jesus from what is divine without destroying the integrity of what God has done.

I think that we often think of the Incarnation as a passing thing, that God became a human being for a while, then stopped. However, where do we get that idea? Not from the Bible. We read that Jesus was raised bodily from the grave, that He ascended bodily to heaven, and that He will bodily return and reign forever. We never read in any part of the New Testament witness that the Son of God ever gives up His humanity.

This means that not only has God taken our broken and diseased humanity upon Himself, not only has God overcome that brokenness from the inside, not only has God suffered the penalty for our sin on the cross that we might be freed from it, not only has God actually taken that same human body and resurrected it from the dead in glory so that our humanity is forever implicated in Christ’s resurrection, God has actually done something more astonishing yet. Jesus ascended to heaven still united to our humanity. God has actually taken our weak, broken humanity and healed it to the point that it can take up residence once again in the Holy Trinity. We need to live our lives knowing that there is a human being with a nature like ours in full Trinitarian fellowship. The more I think about that, the more I am absolutely floored at the love and mercy of God.

So, today is the first Sunday in the season of Advent, the season when we prepare to celebrate Christmas, the coming of God in our human flesh for us and for our salvation. Christmas celebrates something that God has done that makes the angels laugh and should make us fall on our faces in adoration. I will be taking the next two weeks to explore this mystery of the Incarnation a little more fully. I pray that you might fall more deeply in love with God as you think more and more about what God has done for you. Let us join together in extravagant praise to our God, who not only loves us, but, as we have seen in the cross of Christ, loves us, staggeringly, more than God loves Himself. Let us pray.

AMEN