There is a depth to the Incarnation which goes well beyond what we can comprehend into the realm of divine mystery—that age old place of theological duality where restlessness and comfort coexist in loving harmony. While there is much that can be said about the Incarnation, it is the simple truth of its mysterious depth which seems its most revealing quality. Humans cannot understand Incarnation fully, for the same reason they cannot understand the Trinity completely—human beings are simply not deep enough. Nor will they ever be deep enough. There are truths which are simply beyond the depths of reason because of the nature—and the simple fact—of our beginning.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and eventually even man and woman, whom He blessed with His image and likeness. Leaving the particulars of this likeness for another day, we can infer that it was not an exact copy of God’s own Image for the simple fact that humanity has a beginning dependent on a pre-existent Creator; whereas God Himself is eternally self-sufficient without end or beginning. Scripture teaches about unending bliss or damnation depending on the choice of the individual human which proves the unending nature of “human eternality” yet it is impossible for human beings to be without beginning. And therein lies the rub.
Adam and Eve wanted to be more like God than was appropriate for them. In their attempt to know ‘good and evil’ they rejected the deeper relational knowledge of harmony. Knowledge of such lesser things does nothing to nurture the individual if one divorces themselves from the Deepest Truth to it. Adam and Eve were left like two trees rooted into themselves. Withering. Dying. Humanity blew away from its home, across the world they had destroyed, carrying the accursed disconnected knowledge they paid so much to steal. Knowledge which only served to make it more difficult for them to deny themselves and fruitfully live lives of willing submission to God.
We broke ourselves by trying to fix ourselves when we had no need of repair. As a result we ended up without the simple thing which kept life livable. Faith. The simple ability to experience God and His creation and to innocently accept the truth of both without having to box it up and own it. To read a story without having to covet authorship. Mankind became twisted by Satan’s lie and needed a way out of its fantasy. The only way for men to get out was for God to step in.
This is the mystery of Christ. That the second person of the Trinity can be something as limited as a human being. That the Word can be contained within space and time, while simultaneously existing beyond the spatial and temporal universe, giving life, motion, and being to all things. The Word was in the Virgin womb while the Virgin lived and moved and had her being in the Word—and yet there was only one Word! We can try and understand this but the simple truth of the matter is that the Word of God is so wondrous that He can be the Firstborn among Creation even though He ‘existed’ before existence.
Christ can be born generations upon generations after creation outside of Eden and somehow still be more the Man than Adam ever was. And the sheer beauty of it all is that this is not a change in the laws of the universe but a revelation of their true nature. The laws of time and space are subject to God so that when the Word of God, at the behest of His Father, enters the physical world its laws seem to wrap around Him. Miracles happen, same as more common laws of physics, simply because the higher reality of God Himself wills that they do so. All this because we have Someone bigger than the universe inside the universe. And yet all this revelation of creation’s relation to God is still secondary to the principle purpose of the Incarnation: Restoration of the unity of humanity and Divinity.
Christ came both to show man the way out and to be his way out. Remembering the ties between Christmas and Easter, one knows that Jesus was born to die. He came to pay the debt of mankind and to bring mankind into Him. Because there is something “new under the Sun” as my friend Mackenzie Mulligan has pointed out, humans have a means for a return to bliss. We have the Son beneath the Sun. Under the Son there is new life. There is hope for the future and forgiveness for the past. There is the opportunity for active unity by the Holy Spirit with the fullness of God even in this present earth.
Incarnation: The Son of God became Man and dwelt among men so that they might in Him become sons of God. Among them He lived and moved and had being so that they might do the same.
