Incarnation

He is Isaac, the beloved Son of the Father who was offered as a sacrifice, but nevertheless did not succumb to the power of death… He is the victorious and noble king David, bringing by his hand all rebellious power to subjection… He is the strong and powerful Samson, who by his death has overwhelmed all his enemies. It follows that every good thing we could think or desire is to be found in this same Jesus Christ alone. For, he was sold, to buy us back; captive, to deliver us; condemned, to absolve us; he was made a curse for our blessing, sin offering for our righteousness; marred that we may be made fair; he died for our life… In short, mercy has swallowed up all misery, and goodness all misfortune.

Since the fall of man, God’s promise to redeem and restore has permeated the air and found its way into the lyrics of kings and criminals. It has been the anthem of the helpless, blind, lame, and guilt-ridden—a song of hope in the night… In the pasture-lands outside Bethlehem, this song rose like a celestial orchestra… Then all at once, as with the fall of a curtain, the night fell silent, and the audience went back to their homes. Bethlehem went back to being the ordinary town it had been for as long as anyone could remember. But the world would never be the same.

The Old Testament is a fully furnished room that is poorly lit—you need the New Testament to understand it. Every theophany teaches about Jesus Christ.

And so, with barely a ripple of notice, God stepped into the warm lake of humanity. Without protocol and without pretension. Where you would have expected heads of state, there were only donkeys, a few haltered cows, a nervous ball of sheep… Thus, in the little town of Bethlehem, that one silent night, the royal birth of God’s Son tiptoed quietly by, as the world slept.

The future of the human family rides on... A promise spoken and not forgotten. A man names Abraham strode off into his unpredictable futures he gambled on the laity of a primes uttered by a Presence he has scarcely begun to feel.  And so the new possibility for history began.moses tried to gets better fix on the intity of this Presence..."what is your name?" he dared not ask. And the answer came: ... “  am he who will be there with you" (Ex 3:14). ...then a man from Galilee talked to his friends about sealing this ancient promise in his blood and a day later he spilled it...on a mound they call Golgotha. "I am he who will be there with you" was there with us, dying, then rising and then being with us until the end of the world...human destiny rests on a promise freely given and reliably remembered. Whenever you and I make and keep a promise, we are as close to being like God as we can ever be. When you say to anyone that you will be there with them, you are only a millimeter beneath the angels.

I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion … if ever a myth had become a fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no Person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognizable … yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god … Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not 'a religion,' nor 'a philosophy.' It is the summing up and actuality of them all.

Christlikeness is not produced by imitation, but by inhabitation. We allow Christ to live through us. "for this is the secret: Christ lives in you" (Colossians 1:27)

If God on the Cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste for death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to the mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love. That was Father Martin's answer.

The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens – at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences … To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other … Those who do not know that this great myth became fact, when the Virgin conceived are, indeed to be pitied … We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic … shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher.

The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic; it was not a place of myths explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true.

The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation — This story begins and ends in joy.

Brennan Manning’s book entitled, “Ragamuffin Gospel.” In it he describes a rather solemn scene between a surgical physician and a young couple. The book reads: I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, somewhat clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, had been severed. She will be this way from now on. I had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve. Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, the moment is a private one. Who are they, I ask myself? He and this wry mouth I have made, who gaze at each other so generously, so lovingly. The young woman speaks. ''Will my mouth always be like this?' she asks. "Yes, I say, it will. It is because the nerve was cut." She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles. “I like it,” he says, “It’s kind of cute. All at once I know who he is. I understand and I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a God moment. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.”

An intimate moment with Mary and Jospeh. For the census, the royal family has to travel eighty-five miles.  Joseph walks, while Mary, nine months pregnant, rides sidesaddle on a donkey, feeling every jolt, every rut, every rock in the road. The night is still when Joseph creaks open the stable door.   As he does, a chorus of barn animals makes discordant note of the intrusion.  The stench is pungent and humid, as there have not been enough hours in the day to tend the guests, let alone the livestock.  A disquieting place for a woman in the throes of childbirth.  Far from home.  Far from family.  Far from what she had expected for her firstborn. It is a relief just to finally get off the donkey.  She leans back against the wall, her feet swollen, back aching, contractions growing stronger and closer together. Joseph’s eyes dart around the stable.  Not a minute to lose.  Quickly.  A feeding trough would have to make for a crib.  Hay would serve as a mattress.  Blankets?  Blankets? Ah, his robe.  That would do.  A gripping contraction doubles Mary over and sends him racing for a bucket of water. A scream from Mary knifes through the calm of that silent night.  Joseph returns, breathless, water sloshing from the wooden bucket. Joseph places a garment beneath her, and with a final push and a long sigh her labor is over. The Messiah has arrived. The Son of the Most High God umbilically tied to a lowly Jewish girl. The baby chokes and coughs.  Joseph instinctively turns him over and clears his throat.  Then he cries.  Mary reaches for the shivering baby, lays him on her chest, and his helpless cries subside. Deity nursing from a young maiden’s breast.  Could anything be more puzzling-or more profound? She looks up at Joseph, and through a watery veil, their souls touch.  He crowds close, cheek to cheek with his betrothed.  Together they stare in awe at the baby Jesus, whose heavy eyelids begin to close.  It has been a long journey.  The King is tired. And so, with barely a ripple of notice, God stepped into the warm lake of humanity.  Without protocol and without pretension. Where you would have expected heads of state, there were only donkeys, a few haltered cows, a nervous ball of sheep, a tethered camel, and a furtive scurry of curious barn mice. Except for Joseph, there was no one to share Mary’s pain.  Or her joy.  Yes, there were angels announcing the Savior’s arrival-but only to a band of blue-collar shepherds.  And yes, a magnificent star shone in the sky to mark his birthplace-but only three foreigners bothered to look up and follow it. Thus, in the little town of Bethlehem…that one silent night…the royal birth of God’s Son tiptoed quietly by…as the world slept

But Herod believed. At least, enough to worry. He was one prone to err on the side of caution, and so it was enough for him that the Magi had come so far, laden with such gifts. And if there was such a king, maybe the Magi could lead him there. Maybe if he feigned a desire to bring a tribute of his own, the Magi would trust him and lead him to this new king. “When you find him,” Herod told the visitors, “come back and tell me where he is. I have a little something of my own I want to give him.” (Mt 2: 8) After hearing him out, the Magi left for Bethlehem. It wasn’t long before their familiar star rose again, leading them as a shepherd leads its sheep to a house on the outskirts of town. When they found the king, it was no wonder he was nothing more than a murmur in Jerusalem. They entered the place where he lay and beheld a child in the arms of a young woman, practically still a girl. There was no crown or majesty that would attract them to him, no miracle they could see, no signs of greatness. Just a woman and her child. But there was something about that moment that only the woman, her husband, the Magi, and the child knew—something that bent the knees of those scholars to the posture of worship when they saw him… …For most of the residents of Bethlehem, Jesus’ birth went unnoticed, but heaven and earth converged in this little pocket of the Promised Land for the most important birth in history. The angels orchestrated the unlikely meeting of the poor, the displaced, and the curious to announce the coming of the Savior of the world. To some they appeared in dreams. To others they spoke from the sky. To others still, perhaps they shone like a star, leading the Magi to the place where the child was born. Through it all, the angels of the heavenly host had their eyes fixed on this village south of Jerusalem. Since the fall of man, God’s promise to redeem and restore has permeated the air and found its way into the lyrics of kings and criminals. It has been the anthem of the helpless, blind, lame, and guilt-ridden—a song of hope in the night, rolling in from some distant country with the trace of a melody known by heart. In the pasture-lands outside Bethlehem, this song rose like a celestial orchestra, crashing, singing, resounding with the music, holding nothing back. Then all at once, as with the fall of a curtain, the night fell silent, and the audience went back to their homes. Bethlehem went back to being the ordinary town it had been for as long as anyone could remember. But the world would never be the same.

It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be “primarily” true…The Christian joy, the Gloria, is of the same kind…But this story is supreme; and it is true…Legend and History have met and fused…The gospel has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the “happy ending.”

There fared a mother driven forth Out of an inn to roam; In the place where she was homeless All men are at home. The crazy stable close at hand, With shaking timber and shifting sand, Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand Than the square stones of Rome. For men are homesick in their homes, And strangers under the sun, And they lay on their heads in a foreign land Whenever the day is done. Here we have battle and blazing eyes, And chance and honour and high surprise, But our homes are under miraculous skies Where the yule tale was begun. A Child in a foul stable, Where the beasts feed and foam; Only where He was homeless Are you and I at home; We have hands that fashion and heads that know, But our hearts we lost - how long ago! In a place no chart nor ship can show Under the sky's dome. This world is wild as an old wives' tale, And strange the plain things are, The earth is enough and the air is enough For our wonder and our war; But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings And our peace is put in impossible things Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings Round an incredible star. To an open house in the evening Home shall men come, To an older place than Eden And a taller town than Rome. To the end of the way of the wandering star, To the things that cannot be and that are, To the place where God was homeless And all men are at home.

Towards noon Pilate gave judgment, and they made such haste to execution as that by noon he was upon the cross. There now hangs that sacred body upon the cross, rebaptized in his own tears, and sweat, and embalmed in his own blood alive. There are those bowels of compassion which are so conspicuous, so manifested, as that you may see them through his wounds. There those glorious eyes grew faint in their sight, so as the sun, ashamed to survive them, departed with his light too. And then that Son of God, who was never from us, and yet had now come a new way unto us in assuming our nature, delivers that soul (which was never out of his Father's hands) by a new way, a voluntary emission of it into his Father's hands; for though to this God our Lord belonged these issues of death, so that considered in his own contract, he must necessarily die, yet at no breach or battery which they had made upon his sacred body issued his soul; but emisit, he gave up the ghost; and as God breathed a soul into the first Adam, so this second Adam breathed his soul into God, into the hands of God. There we leave you in that blessed dependency, to hang upon him that hangs upon the cross, there bathe in his tears, there suck at his wounds, and lie down in peace in his grave, till he vouchsafe you a resurrection, and an ascension into that kingdom which He hath prepared for you with the inestimable price of his incorruptible blood. Death’s Duel, John Donne http://www.thewords.com/articles/duel2.htm

That a god should put up with adversity, I could understand. The gods of Hinduism face their fair share of thieves, bullies, kidnapers and usurpers. What is Ramayana but the account of one long, bad day for Rama? Adversity, yes. Reversals of fortune, yes. Treachery, yes. But humiliation? Death? I couldn't imagine Lord Krishna consenting to be stripped, naked, whipped, mocked, dragged through the streets and, to top it off, crucified--at at the hands of mere humans to boot. I'd never heard of a Hindu god dying. But divinity should not be blighted by death. It's wrong...It was wrong of this Christian God to let his avatar die. That is tantamount to letting a part of himself die. For if the Son is to die, it cannot be fake. If God on the cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me that it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste of death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect?

The first thing that drew me in was disbelief. What? Humanity sins but it’s God’s Son who pays the price?….

Why not leave death to mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect? Love. That was Father Martin’s answer….

Accordingly, Christians have always measured sin, in part, by the suffering needed to atone for it. The ripping and writhing of a body on a cross, the bizarre metaphysical maneuver of using death to defeat death, the urgency of the summons to human beings to ally themselves with the events of Christ and with the person of these events, and then to make that person and those events the center of their lives —these things tell us that the main human trouble is desperately difficult to fix, even for God, and that sin is the longest-running of human emergencies.

expressing and acquiring them —cross, resurrection, Spirit, justification, baptism into Christ

This does not fit with the modern idea that we are all getting through to God in our own way. No, says Matthew. God has got through to us in this way. And Jesus is no great teacher, no guru, no peer of Mohammed or Gandhi. He is GOD with us. That is the essential claim on which Christianity is built. It is a claim which cannot be abandoned without abandoning the faith entirely.

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a ‘description’ of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are the translations into our concepts and ideas of that wh. God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened…

The incarnation that starts on Christmas isn't finished until Good Friday. And the miracles that start in the strange, inexplicable Virgin Birth aren't finished until the resurrection.