A. K. Chidgzey

The word ‘Incarnation’ comes from the Latin incarno, meaning “in flesh”, which is generally drawn from John 1.14 – “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”

In simple terms, it’s God becoming human. The creator getting amongst the creation.

We have discussed this somewhat in other episodes, so you might like to listen to the episodes on Christology, Arianism, Nestorianism, and the Chalcedonian Schism before listening to this episode, but you don’t have to. No one’s making you. But in this episode, we’ll discuss some of the broader implications of the claim that Jesus was, and is, God incarnate.

The claim that Jesus is both God and human is a weird thing to say, to be honest, but it’s a faithful attempt at explaining descriptions of the encounters that people had of Jesus that were then recorded, some of which became part of the New Testament. It is not to say that there are two Gods, but one – two natures in the one person, united but not mixed or compromised. This mystery is precisely that which is celebrated at Christmas on the 25^th of December. Why the 25^th? Listen to the last episode!

This idea of the incarnation is actually unique among the major world religions. No other religion says that God became flesh. There’s not really anything like it in any of the older mythologies. There are versions of animism and pantheism but those are still quite distinct. Hinduism has a king of incarnation theology, these divine beings known as avatars. Krishna was an avatar of Vishnu, but it’s not exactly the same. The avatar doesn’t actually become flesh in the same sense. And various religions like Buddhism have a form of reincarnation, but that’s not a divine being becoming human. Christianity stands alone in this sense.

One of the key biblical texts that speaks to this doctrine of incarnation is John ch.1. Let’s have a read.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth…No one has ever see God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

In this opening passage to the Gospel of John, a philosophical rumination on who Jesus was, we read that the Logos, the Word, was with God and was God and became flesh and lived among us. In Greek, the key word of v.14 is eskēnōsen, the root word meaning to pitch one’s tent, to make their dwelling place. A contemporary translation could be that the Word rented a house in the suburbs, with a good café around the corner, close to a train station, and with that one weird neighbour who practices their bagpipes at dinner time.

Is…that not everyone’s experience?

But think about that: Imagine if Donald Trump rented the house next to yours and became your neighbour…

Maybe not a thought I would really like to entertain…

Or to put it into a first century context, imagine being a Jewish peasant and along comes Caesar and sets up a carpentry workshop next to yours. That would be pretty wild, and you’d probably live in constant fear of getting caught up in some assassination plot. Profits would likely see a significant drop at the ides of March.

The word also recalls the tabernacle, which was the tent that Israelites used as their centre of worship until they constructed their temple. It represented the physical location on Earth of God’s presence. Though the word eskēnōsen does not itself connote anything supernatural, I think its use in this first chapter of John is supposed to remind people of this idea of God living among his people.

And that’s also the meaning of one of the names given to Jesus: Immanuel. In Matthew ch.1 an angel appeared to Joseph and tells him that the child that Mary would give birth to would be called Immanuel, quoting from Isaiah ch.7. And this name literally means, “God with us.” By itself, this is not a statement of Jesus’ divinity, but when combined with everything else, it certainly points to Jesus’ divinity. At the end of Matthew, Jesus’ final words are “I am with you, always, to the end of the age,” functioning as bookends, or to use technical jargon, it functions as an inclusio. At the beginning of Matthew Jesus is called ‘God with us’ and at the end of Matthew Jesus says ‘I am with you.’

This idea of being with us, of tabernacling with his people, making his dwelling amongst and renting the house next to, is the essence of the incarnation. He is not distant. He is close. He is not unfeeling or unaware. He has firsthand knowledge of the human experience.

Another key passage is from the epistle to the Philippians:

Christ Jesus, who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.

This was likely a hymn or a creed that had been floating around the early Jesus movements, which Paul liked, approved of, and included in his letter. And there’s a lot in this little passage, too much for us to cover right now. But generally it’s a statement of Jesus crossing class boundaries, going from the upper echelons to the very bottom, the lowest of the low.

There is a direct correlation to the patriarchal social structure of the Roman Empire. At the top of Caesar who was basically deified and then at the very bottom are the slaves. But even beneath the slaves are those who would be crucified. Crucifixion was not just a painful torturous execution but an utterly, horrifically shameful event. Stripped naked, sometimes beaten, sometimes sexually abused, strung up, mocked, left to die in a slow, painful way as people watched and jeered, and then your body left for wild animals. In an honour/shame Patriarchal world, this was the worst.

But in this Christ hymn we see Jesus at the top, in the form of God, stepped down to become a human, and then a slave, and then to embrace death, and to receive crucifixion. So now it’s not just Caesar setting up a workshop next to yours, but doing the absolute unthinkable and accepting crucifixion. Again, just an absolutely outrageous, impossible, blasphemous concept for a first century Roman. Maybe it would also be like Trump not just moving in next to you, but converting his precious Mar-a-Lago into a refuge for Palestinian refugees.

Jesus having the humility to take that step of self-debasement is the incarnation, which ultimately results in the elevation of humanity. Jesus’ condescension is humanity’s exaltation.

There’s an interesting phrase here, the claim that Jesus emptied himself. This is the notion of kenosis, and has caused a considerable amount of debate amongst theologians over the years. It’s a topic that probably deserves its own episode, which maybe I’ll do one day. But does it mean that Jesus emptied himself of his divinity? Or emptied himself of his power or knowledge? Orthodox positions of Jesus and the Holy Trinity maintain that Jesus did not empty himself of his divinity, he was fully divine, and that’s where it gets all confusing and complicated.

Personally, I take a less metaphysical, ontological position and say that Paul or whoever first wrote this poem was saying, simply, that Jesus was emptying himself of his glory, or in 21^st century language we might say that he emptied himself of his privilege. The Lord of creation to servant of creation to victim of creation.

In Colossians 2.9, the author declares that in Christ the fullness of deity dwells bodily, which is just another way of saying that Jesus is God incarnate, God taking on the flesh of the human body.

A major implication of this is that if God is embodied in the person of Jesus, that Jesus is a reflection of God and the exact imprint of God’s very being, then we know what God is like. The incarnation is the ultimate act of God’s self-revelation to us. We only need to look to Jesus to see the sorts of things that God cares about.

There is also another tricky theological implication and that has to do with Jesus’ existence before his earthly life. We have to be careful when we talk about the pre-existence of Jesus, because there is, in truth, very little we can possibly know and very little spoken about this theme in the Bible. There are some descriptions of God in the Hebrew Bible which imply a plurality, but it’s difficult to extrapolate much specific information from this. People didn’t know about Jesus until Jesus came along and introduced himself.

The message of the incarnation is that God became flesh, not Jesus per se. However, some of the things that Jesus said and are written about Jesus in the New Testament suggest that it was in fact him, as the Logos, the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, who existed since the very beginning of time.

In John ch.17, Jesus prays:

So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existence.

The implication of this is that Jesus had an existence, with God, before his earthly life.

Other verses include the ones we’ve already quoted, the beginning of John where the Word was involved in creation and in Philippians where Jesus existed in the form of God, but emptied himself to become human. There are quite a few other verses which point to Jesus’ pre-existence, but I’m not going to go through all of them right now. We’ve covered some of that in previous episodes.

Theologically and philosophically, the incarnation poses great challenges. One of which is that this is not a simple change for Jesus, as if he put on a new set of clothes or hopped out of one car and got into another. There is a fundamental difference between the being of God and of human nature. It’s far more significant than, say, corn in a microwave turning into popcorn or egg whites turning into a meringue – those are still material things. The difference between God and humanity is vast.

The German theologian Karl Barth called this chasm the ontological gap. Ontology having to do with being and nature and identity. In the incarnation, God steps across this great chasm to inhabit the world of the natural and associate himself with his creation. In so doing, God condescends and exalts humanity. God steps down to lift humanity up. This ontological gap is precisely that which separates humanity from God and it is only God who can step across that gap.

However, the incarnation does reveal that that gap, while uncrossable for humans, is not infinitely different. There are similarities between God and humanity. That God was able to inhabit huma flesh without compromising his divinity, that humans were created in the image of God, that Jesus could then function as the perfect image of God and reveal God through and in his humanity, demonstrates that, ontologically and metaphysically, the distinction between the natural and the supernatural is one that I don’t think really exists, I think there is considerable overlap. My episode on sacramentalism explores that a little further. But I think the relationship between creation and its creator is a fluid, organic relationship. There is a distinction, but not a hard and fast one, not black and white. More like granite and olive.

The essential promise of the incarnation and of Christmas is that there is no ugliness, no muck, no violence, nothing so human that is beyond God’s reach or so far gone that it is beyond God’s redemption.

God did not come as one of the privileged elite, a wealthy aristocrat or heir to an imperial throne. Jesus was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth and did not attend an exclusive private school. He wasn’t born into nobility or old money and his father, either of his fathers, didn’t buy him a Porsche when he finished high school. He was just like the majority of the people at the time. He was utterly, tediously normal. 

“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Questioned Nathaniel. Not Rome or Athens or a throne. Not accompanied by angels or a procession of any kind. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus’ basinet was an animal trough.

He grew up, he learnt, he worked. It’s probable he took on his father’s occupation as either a carpenter or stone mason – Mark 6 refers to Jesus, in Greek, as a tekton, which generally means crafts person, often translated as carpenter, but Jesus actually lived really close to a major quarry so it’s also likely he worked with stone – he might have even worked on one of Herod’s big building projects, either in the nearby town of Sepphoris or Caesarea Maritima. He followed his cousin John’s lead and joined a movement resisting Roman occupation and challenging the religious elite. Some scholars have argued that the Gospels provide little hints that Jesus might have been involved in a direct revolt of the Jewish temple, retold in sanitized versions as him cleansing the temple of money changers, which led to him being charged with treason and subsequently executed.

He had a family, he had friends, he had emotions, he attended parties and festivals and celebrations. The point is that he was a human, utterly, abjectly, beautifully human. He might have been a bit of a troublemaker, a bit of a sage and a leader, but he was just like everyone else. He was normal.

But he was more than that.

The people around him and later generations who claimed to have experienced him, recognized something peculiar about this Jesus. The New Testament displays, I believe, a hesitancy to come right out and say that Jesus is divine, but I believe that the authors believed that and their descriptions of Jesus point in that direction. They were very aware of the magnitude of the claim that Jesus is God, but of course every now and then they seem to be a little bit bolder and say something a little more explicit.

Over the course of several centuries, many controversies and a bunch of council meetings, some of which we’ve explored in earlier episodes, they formulated the doctrines of Jesus’ divinity and of the Holy Trinity.

But this is the irony and the poignancy of the Christmas message. That the creator entered creation to serve creation. In the incarnation, Jesus who was God was also human. An ordinary, flesh and blood human. God never considered themselves too good or humanity too bad; God embraced that which God created as it is. And in so doing, exalted that creation, honoured it.

The challenge of this Christmas message is for us to do the same. To live lives of radical generosity, humility, and love for others, no matter who they may be. If God was willing to step across the infinite space between creator and creation, then we should be willing to step across the road to help our neighbour.

We should live incarnational lives, not separating ourselves away from the world which God loves, but we should embrace it, step into it, love it, care for it and everyone in it. There is no space within Christianity for exclusion or seclusion or bigotry or elitism of any kind. To be a Christian is to be like Christ, and to be like Christ is to live a life of radical, incarnational love.

This goes beyond dropping tracts in people’s letterboxes or standing on street corners screaming at people or getting into debates on tiktok or expecting your pastor or priest to do all the work. Instead, you should do life with people, get vulnerable with people, share good moments and difficult moments, send memes to one another, play basketball and boardgame with one another, help others and then ask them for help, tip your barista and compliment someone’s driving, all the while doing the sort of things that Christ wants from you: to love, to fight injustice, to care for the forgotten and downtrodden, vote for good policies, and try to make the world just that little bit better.

That’s what it means to be incarnational, to set up your tent, your dwelling place alongside other people, it’s to be in that world, a valuable part of the community who seeks to improve that community and the lives of everyone within that community.

And remember that if you don’t do this, that if you are bad, Santa Clause will know. So you’d better watch out and you’d better not pout; you don’t want to annoy a magical bearded person who is able to slip in and out of every single house in the world in a single night.

But rest assured, I am sure every single one of you, loyal Isms and Schisms listeners, are on Santa’s good list.

So that’s it for this episode, for this Christmas series, for 2023. I’ve had fun, I hope you’ve had fun. I’d really appreciate it if you rated, reviewed, subscribed, and shared with someone. I’ll be back next year in 2024, probably around March, so keep on the lookout for that.

Have a very merry Christmas and the happiest of new years.