Above and behind all of the shopping, the parties, the cookies, the Sunday school pageants, favorite carols and the maddening and unending synthesized versions of those carols pervading the shopping malls, Christmas is first and last about the Incarnation. Christmas is about the birth of Jesus the Christ to Mary and Joseph, a poor, backcountry Jewish couple in the final years of the reign of King Herod. I know that Christians, especially Lutheran Christians know this truth. Yet, I have come to realize in my own life that the Incarnation, the Christmas event and the Christmas Truth, is not a unified picture: an icon or a painting. Rather, the Christmas mystery is a mosaic or even a jigsaw puzzle. Christmas is a number of bits and pieces, facts and truths that must be brought together intentionally, or to be a bit more honest, puzzled out.
Christians have spent 2000 years pondering the meaning of the Incarnation. Beginning with the prolegomena of the Johannine Gospel through Anselm’s Cur Deus homo[[1]] and on to Martin Luther’s and following him Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s insistence that “the finite can contain the infinite,”[[2]] Christians have tried to understand what God’s birth as the human Jesus means. The puzzle of Incarnation is not restricted to pieces that look like Mary, Joseph, shepherds, angels, cows, sheep, and the donkey. Incarnation also includes discussions and declarations of human rights, inclusive language in worship, gender roles, sexuality, and a great many other contentious and seemingly modern issues. The doctrine of Incarnation begins perhaps with a statement about God becoming human but it encompasses almost every question of what it means to be human. The Incarnation mosaic, the jigsaw puzzle is indeed complex. I believe that at the heart of the human ramifications of Christ’s incarnation are two statements, the first commonly expressed and the second rarely so. In the first, Christians maintain that in Jesus, God has become a human being like me. The second, and equally vital affirmation, is that in Jesus, God has become a human being who is not me. There is the rub so to speak. The challenge of the Incarnation is to take seriously the complete and unique humanity of Jesus of Nazareth while maintaining the complete, unique, and utterly different humanity of me. As soon as I write that second proposition, I can hear in my head all manner of objections. Many Christians would stridently assert that Jesus is not utterly different from me. Jesus and I and all people share many characteristics. That is very true, but in the very moment we start to enumerate shared characteristics we start to move away from Incarnation into abstraction. Incarnation is the antithesis of abstraction. The heart of the mystery of the Incarnation is that God was in Jesus of Nazareth for the salvation and redemption of the cosmos. God was in the specific and concrete life of Jesus lived in Palestine in the First century Anno Domini. Christians proclaim that life, that life of Jesus, as the normative human life. Nevertheless, normative usually comes to mean abstract. The human Jesus becomes the humanity of Jesus. The Jewish Jesus becomes Jewishness morphing into Christianity. The Rabbi Jesus becomes theology. The laborer Jesus becomes poverty or ministry. The man Jesus becomes masculinity or patriarchy depending on your perspective and the unmarried Jesus becomes celibacy.
At every turn the human life of Jesus, the marvelous, the mysterious, the joyously incomprehensible condescension of God’s full entry into the creation is launched back into the ethereal by our insistence on abstraction. I suspect that abstraction is both simple human laziness and more seriously, a crutch for human self-idolatry. I cling to the abstracted characteristics of Jesus to erase the scandal of particularity, the scandal that Jesus is not me. With all my heart, I want to look into the face of Jesus in the manger and see me smiling back at myself. At all cost I, and every human being, long to maintain the fiction that “I am the center of all things.” We bring what Luther calls the first sin, his incurvatus in se [turned in upon myself], to the manger and expect to find a mirror in the straw. If I am honest with myself, I come to the manger hoping to find that Isaiah’s warning, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord,”[[3]] will have been erased. Instead, at the manger I realize that not only am I alienated from my God, but also from my fellow humans.
This is where the laziness comes into play. By nature, we are self-centered. Put bluntly, we tolerate other persons only as far as they meet some need of ours. Even the most loving, the most self-effacing, the most altruistic people wrestle with the objectification of the neighbor and the world. Abstraction allows us to disguise this tendency a bit. I can take refuge in the fact that I am attracted to intelligence, or beauty, or shared interests, common spirituality; you name it. In addition, on the other side I can cite the lack of these shared abstract characteristics as an excuse for me to avoid or dislike other people. When we pigeon hole our friends, and we do, or when we isolate and ignore our enemies, we do so with abstracted characteristics as reasons. I am too lazy actually to know all the people I encounter in my daily life so I abstract them, I categorize them. It is much easier. In addition, most of us probably harbor the suspicion that each of us is in reality unknowable. “Unless you are in my shoes you wouldn’t understand,” springs so easily to the lips. Not to mention the t-shirts: It’s a Man thing, a Womyn thing, a Gay thing, a Black thing…You wouldn’t understand! If this is true then we are all in deep trouble. Not only are we each then hopelessly isolated from each other, but also the Incarnation becomes a cruel cosmic joke. God comes so close in Jesus, and yet is still so far away in the life of a human other than me, removed in time and space and experience from my own existence.
The trap, and indeed, the lie are in the abstractions. We believe that the abstractions, the characteristics, the commonalities are the bridges between us and God, between us and our fellow creatures. However, in reality there are never enough commonalities to overcome the difference, no one is ever enough like me truly to be known to me by those commonalities, to make me feel comfortable with them, to know and be known in the way I crave. There is no way around “Unless you’re in my shoes you wouldn’t understand” by way of abstraction. The only possible bridge is love. Love that translates into relationship, attention, empathy, compassion, regard, and identification with the other rather than self is the only way past the absolute particularity of existence. This is the ultimate mystery and the ultimate grace of Jesus Incarnation. Jesus is utterly, completely, and absolutely human for me. Jesus lived his life for me in a way that prior to the Incarnation was impossible for any human. Jesus comes to me not in regard to my sin or my righteousness, not in regard to any characteristic, abstraction, or concept. Jesus comes to me purely in love, love for me Steve Sabin. Moreover, coming to me Steve Sabin, Jesus bids me to love him, Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Christ, Jesus the Son of God not for his characteristics, not even for his grace and love. Jesus invites me to love him, as he lives, as he is.
Incarnation is the invitation to stop looking for ourselves in God, in worship, in our partner, in our children, in entertainment, in political candidates. Incarnation is the invitation finally to see the other, from the Great Other, God, on down to the other next door, the other in bed next to us. In seeing the other, really seeing the other, Incarnation finally allows us to escape the crushing curse of being alone. The ancient evils: sin, death, and the power of the devil are in the last analysis nothing other than being without God, being alone.
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
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, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but 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. (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ ”) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.[[4]]
© copyright 2006 the Rev. Steven P. Sabin
[1]
Why God became human: Title of St. Anselm’s great work which expresses God’s salvific will in the decision of the Godhead that the Second Person of the Trinity become human in order to save humanity from its sins. Bretzke, James T.:
Consecrated Phrases : A Latin Theological Dictionary : Latin Expressions Commonly Found in Theological Writings. electronic ed. Collegeville, MN : Liturgical Press, 2000, c1998
[2]
finitum capax infiniti[3]
The Holy Bible : New Revised Standard Version. Nashville : Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989, S. Is 55:8
[4]
The Holy Bible : New Revised Standard Version. Nashville : Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989 : John 1:1-18
