Concerning the Meaning of the Incarnation
John 1:1-18, The Second Sunday of Christmastide
By Chuck Poole
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”
With those words, this morning’s gospel lesson takes up the great mystery of the incarnation: the God no one has ever seen, embodied in the life of Jesus; the God who created the universe, roughly 13 billion years ago, fleshed out, for about 30 years, in a single, local, physical human life—the life of Jesus.
Across the Christian centuries, what that might mean has been one of Christianity's most important questions, spawning church councils and official creeds in the fourth and fifth centuries, and inspiring one particularly important, and influential, book in the 11th century, by a theologian named Anselm of Canterbury, who, in a book called Cur Deus Homo? (Why Did God Become Human?) gave the Church an understanding of the incarnation which has shaped the Church from then to now.
Anselm’s basic idea went something like this: Jesus was born to be the sacrifice God gave to God’s self to satisfy God’s requirement for a perfect human sacrifice, so that God would then be free to forgive sinful humans without compromising God’s holiness; a way of explaining the incarnation which, a thousand years ago, took root in the church and, a thousand years later, continues to dominate popular Christianity; a way of explaining the incarnation which is often summed up in the simple saying, “Jesus was born to die.”
All of which may be true. There is, after all, some Bible to support Anselm’s explanation of the incarnation, and it is believed by many dear and devout souls to be the truth concerning the coming of Christ we celebrate during this sacred season of Christmastide.
But, for other Christians, myself among them, it is a way of thinking about the incarnation which raises more questions than it answers.
Indeed, while I cannot speak for you, but as for me, I wonder if it might be more true to the Spirit of God to say that the incarnation is primarily not about a problem—our alienation from God, and how to fix it (a human sacrifice to God)—but about a life and how to live it, and about a love, and how to give it (WBS bold).
It is Jesus, embodying the grace and truth of God in a way which gave us our best look at who God is, how God acts and what God wants for us and from us. God, coming into the world in Jesus, not because God’s hands were tied by a sacrificial system of God’s own creation which kept God from forgiving and welcoming sinners until God could give God’s self the sacrifice God required; but, perhaps, because God is relentlessly determined to be with us, in the best and worst of life; no mess so big, sin so bad, or humiliation so embarrassing that God won’t join us in the absolute hardest and worst of it. The signs of which are that Jesus, the ultimate incarnation of God, was born poor and vulnerable in a barn, and that Jesus, the ultimate incarnation of God, died naked and humiliated on a cross.
And, between Jesus’ birth in a barn and Jesus’ death on a cross, Jesus could always be found keeping company with those who were on the hard margins and despised edges of life, which, since Jesus was the ultimate incarnation of God, must be a sign of the boundless embrace and expansive empathy of God. Jesus, sitting down with and standing up for the outsiders often enough that it made the insiders fearful enough that they decided to silence Jesus; which, according to the four gospels, is what got Jesus killed. The body of our Lord broken for us all, the blood of our Lord poured out for us all; Jesus, dying as he lived; arms out as wide as the world.
But though the incarnation of God was killed, the incarnation of God did not stay dead, because that one life was the one life that cannot be and, ultimately, will not, be defeated, not even by death.
Which is why I believe that the most true thing we can say about the incarnation of God in Jesus, is that Jesus was born to live—with us, in us, for us, and through us; the embodiment of God’s goodness and love, born again, in Bethlehem every Christmas and in us every day.
Amen.
— This sermon, preached. January 3, 2021 at Northminster Baptist Church in Jackson, Mississippi was recommended by preaching connoisseur, Buddy Shurden, and is reprinted here with permission of the preacher, the pastor of Northminster, Chuck Poole.
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