My first memory was of Christmas. I was four years
old and we had just moved to Denver, Colorado. Denver frequently boasts a white Christmas, hence my first memory
of Christmas was practically storybook--the snow gently falling and a fire
crackling in the living room while the smell of inconsumable amounts of food
drifted in from the kitchen. I love Christmas! I love the hedonism of it, the pagan influences! I love it all, but it would truly be without meaning without the Incarnation!
Obviously
Christmas is more than its scenery. Christmas is a celebration of that moment
in time when God intersected human existence in the most humble and ungod-like
of ways; in the form of a vulnerable baby. God was born into and walked
and breathed and lived and died in our humanity so that we might be born into and
walk and breathe and live forever wedded to His deity.
I guess what
strikes me most about God as a child is that he became dependent. As a relatively new parent, I can now fully appreciate the dependency of the little ones. Just about every other animal gets along at birth with greater independence than do we in the human race. Think of it! God, the
wholly independent one, the first and the last, needed His human parents. He needed
Mary to nourish him as a newborn. He needed to be fed and cleaned up after and
cared for. He needed Joseph to provide shelter and protection for him. He needed someone to teach him to walk, to speak and to perform all the necessary functions of a human child. I wonder if Mary and Joseph ever looked at each other with bewilderment while they potty trained God's son.
Jesus surely would not have made it to manhood without his human parents while we
surely would not have made it to God without Jesus.
We do not often
think of Jesus in such humble terms. We would rather think of him on the mount
of transfiguration, or in his triumphal Second Coming, or perhaps we prefer to
think of Jesus as he is depicted in our pictures and stained-glass windows. But
while Jesus was thoroughly divine, he was also quite thoroughly a man, and
before that an awkward teenager, and before that a boy, and before that a fetus
drawing his human life from his mothers body. Amazing is it not, that God became
dependent on man when we were utterly dependent on Him. This is the mystery of
it! God will not do what we expect. Just when we think we have Him figured out, He surprises us. Consider the Jews before Christ's coming. They were looking
for a triumphant king and instead they got a tiny child who would grow to be a poor mystic that would befriend and heal lepers, tax-collectors, common fisherman,
and sinners.
And why? The simple answer is so that He could lead us back to God as one of us. Salvation is wholly dependent on the Incarnation. I want this to be a short piece, so I'll just say this: Jesus' full humanity and full deity are required for Him to live sinlessly, to die as a full human representative and also for Him to provide a source of new humanity to the race. Perhaps the best way to say it is simply to reaffirm that our sin problem is beyond our capacity to solve, and it also wholly prevents God from moving toward us so long as we possess this problem. Why is it that God can even look upon us filthy, prideful, God-hating sinners? Because in Christ we are drawn up into the glorious mystery of God's ultimate solution to our sinfulness. We are amalgamated to the life of God in Christ, and as a result God when He looks upon us cannot see our sin because of Christ's substitutionary death, and He cannot see any lingering imperfections in us because of Christ's life and resurrection. We are perfect legally. We are perfect actually. And it all began with the entrance of the divine into the filthy environs of a sheep stable and amid the robust and helpless cries of a fragile infant whose help we desperately needed and still need. Merry Christmas!
