Christmas 2023
A typical Christmas scene. A wooden building with straw on the floor. To the right are three men wearing crowns, the one at the front is kneeling presenting his gift. To the left are two boys, probably playing shepherds. In the centre are a couple, a young woman in blue and a man with his head bowed. The scene is lit by electric spotlights.
Merry Christmas.
My Christian tradition emphasizes that God became human in order to die for us, and that all scripture points to that event. Personally, I think it is true, but also that there’s more to it than that. Here are three points I have found about the incarnation that say more than it just being about atonement. Plus, a final section on those spotlights on the picture above.
Jesus is our example…
…of living in the Kingdom of God. Jesus came and lived a faultless life, showing us what living in the kingdom of God looks like. Unlike Jesus, we are not without sin. We will make mistakes, some of them deliberate. Jesus’ meeting with a wpman caught in adultery shows how he fights against sin but fights even harder for the sinner. (John 8:1-11). The incarnation shows that Jesus understands our fears, temptations, and struggles. As the Bible says:
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.
Hebrews 4:15 ESVUK
Jesus is our teacher
Jesus’ teaching is rich and varied. It consists of plain moral teaching for his followers: The three chapters that make up the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) form what could be called a Christian manifesto. To those not yet following, he mostly taught these uneducated rural people in stories of farming and fishing, and he could get weird, using a symbolic language when talking about the future of God’s kingdom. He taught that the Kingdom of God has come down to Earth and is available to anyone who will come. He has not done away with God’s Kingdom being for a special people; that still stands. Jesus taught that we are all special to God. The incarnation teaches that we are all special.
The Godhead and humanity intertwined
This is the difficult bit. How does a supernatural God fit into a human body? Even Paul, who used logic and Jewish theology as much as possible in his letters to the churches gives up at this point and goes poetic:
5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Philippians 2:5-8
I knew it would be difficult to look at the incarnation of Jesus without mentioning the crucifixion. But look at what Paul is saying. Jesus did not become any less God when he became human. He made himself not only human but came in the form of a baby of low human standing. The baby in the Bethlehem manger is fully God. The two natures God and human have become intertwined, you cannot separate them or tell which is which.
That is the intertwining from God’s perspective. From a human perspective, we know that Jesus ascended to heaven and is there at the right hand of God where he prays for us. The nature of the Godhead has changed forever due to the incarnation.
But that is not all. Jesus did not leave his followers alone when he ascended into heaven. The Holy Spirit was sent to live in all those who would accept her, in all those who would accept Jesus, and the Holy Spirit intertwines with our spirit so that you can no longer separate them or know which is which. Having said that we do not listen to our spirits too well, whether that is our own spirit or God’s Holy Spirit. I believe Paul was recognising this in himself when he advised Christians not to quench or restrain the Spirit (1 Thessalonians 5:19), or not to grieve the Holy Spirit of God (Ephesians 4.30). It takes discipline to listen to what the Holy Spirit is saying.
Those spotlights
I’m not bothered by those spotlights in the picture at the top of this post, nor the other anachronism in the picture like having shepherds and wise men at the stable together. I used to complain about such things, as well as the white characters in Christian art, white Mary and Joseph, and white Jesus in the manger or on the cross. But I have also seen the East Asian Jesus on Christmas cards from the Far East and a Black African Jesus on a cross.
I no longer criticise anachronisms, I welcome them.
Some might see that as us creating God in our image, but Jesus needs to be incarnate in our culture as well, in fact in every culture, to speak into that culture. We need Jesus in our lives, in our work and leisure and in our culture. I hope you have the time this Christmas to let the dear Christ enter in.
Merry Christmas.
Incarnation – Epiphany – The baptism of Jesus – Temptation – Good Friday – Easter – Ascension – Pentecost – Trinity – The Return (advent 2024)
Making an ass of myself 