Incarnation

Christianity is founded on the Incarnation. That is what distinguishes us from the other Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam. For them, it is incompatible with the nature and majesty of God. But for Christians, it is the truest revelation of God’s nature.

Not that the Church has had an easy time with Incarnation. It took four hundred years to arrive at a working definition, and ever since there has been drift to a more spiritualised, less earthy view of Jesus. Much of the time Christians have treated him as appearing human whilst really being something else.

None of that is surprising. Religions prefer gods to stay where they belong—up above, remote from the sufferings of our world; for how else can they control things? They have their place, and we have ours. Gods should obey the rules.

To say that the Son ‘came down from heaven’ is one way of saying that this rule has been broken; and the New Testament echoes to the shock. For Paul, the Almighty, the nameless ‘I am’, the Lord of the Hosts of Heaven, has suddenly turned up poor alongside us (Phil 2, 5-8). John preached the immediacy of “that which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and touched with our hands” (1 John 1, 1).

This changes God for us; not just his ‘character’—once distant, now friendly, once judgmental, now gracious—but the whole idea of how God is. He no longer exists as the remote ruler of worlds, exercising power from his unreachable realm of glory. He exists as the active presence of grace in our world, a presence seen most fully in Christ.

The Incarnation frees both God and us. It frees God from confinement to his relentless ‘aboveness’, and it frees us from subjection to whatever is ‘above’ (as Paul says, we are no longer slaves but members of the family). It does so because in Christ we see God as action that has come close, that enters the texture of our lives. How do we know it is God? Because it breaks through the hopeless inheritance of our world, the determinism of evil and its consequences. Christ is that action; he does what we cannot do. He breaks all the rules that alienate God from us and us from ourselves. And that is more than any human being can do.