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| Photo courtesy of www.thecripplegate.com |
At Christmas time, we enter into a special season to consider one deep and yet mysterious spiritual truth: the Incarnation--the belief that the second person of the Trinity, God the Son, became "flesh" by being conceived in the womb of the virgin Mary, becoming completely God and man, to walk among us on the Earth.
We see this truth unfold as we consider the manger scene in our homes and churches, as we behold baby Jesus in the manger, surrounded by angels, shepherds, Mary, Joseph, and in some cases, the Wise Men. It is an event in which Luke, in his gospel account, is very careful to set into a very specific historical time frame, so that we would be sure that this is no mythical account, but history itself, as incredulous as it may seem to its hearers.
But I wonder how many of us stop to consider how radically counter-cultural the theology of the Incarnation truly is--that the spirit world would intersect with the material in the God-man of Christ Jesus... and for what purpose?
Surely Plato or Buddha could never conceive of this! For they exalted the spiritual above the material, and exhorted man, through logic/philosophy and spiritual enlightenment, respectively, to throw off the shackles of the material realm in order to pursue the more important and lofty spiritual realm.
But, the most scandalous truth is that the spiritual and material realm are perfectly united in the Incarnation. One does not negate, taint, or contradict the other!
Theologian Thomas Howard puts it well when he states, "The human mind, and perhaps especially the 'spiritual' mind, has a deep-running suspicion of anything that really does bridge the gulf between spirit and matter. The Sadducees hated the threat of this very thing which surfaced in Christ's claims about Himself....All transcendentalists, logicians, Buddhists, and Manichaeans hate this sort of thing. We must keep spirit and matter in two different realms, they urge. Spirit is material and may not be supposed ever to come upon matter, even though just this seems to have happened at the Annunciation [announcement made by the angel Gabriel to Mary, the mother of Jesus, that she was going to bear a son], with the starkest results."
You see, God does not beckon us away from our humanity! Far from it! Instead, He enters into it and redeems it.
In the Incarnation, God Himself comes to Earth as a baby to eat, grow, become a man and take up a trade, endure temptation, preach, teach, heal, cry, suffer, and die. You see, all these things that belong to our humanity (for angels do none of these things), God Himself purifies and glorifies and delivers them back to us perfectly in the person of Christ. God did not set out to belittle or bemoan human life, but rather to redeem all those things of life and living that had been stolen away from us in service to other gods, and came to set us truly free.
That, dear friend, is the shocking scandal of the Incarnation.
Spirit meets Material--and redeems it.
Praise be to God for this indescribable gift!
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