A mentor of mine once recommended that I read “God So Loved the World: A Life of Christ” every year. I have found that that recommendation has become a thrilling and satisfying act of transforming worship. Elizabeth Goudge begins her masterful synopsis of Jesus, “This is the story of an almost unbelievable humbling.” There is no greater challenge to the human mind than the attempt to fathom that the Eternal Word became flesh (John 1:14). Charles Wesley’s beautiful hymnic phrases “Our God contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man,” help us begin to approach this mystery. The Everlasting Light shines in the darkness. The Timeless One is found lying in a cave. I hope that all of us allow some time this Christmas for a breathless, awed encounter with the truth that God has become fully human. Unfathomable.

Holiness means that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have desired to share the very nature of God with us. That self-giving love is what motivated the incarnation. Jesus did not take on flesh to fix our problems first. He loves us first. He desired to bear our nature. Sent by the Father in the power of the Spirit, Jesus chose to give Himself to us, to be one with us. As a medieval saint prayed, You are “shutting yourself up today in the very pouch of humanity.” And from that glorious, unseen descent into our real, messy humanity we have salvation through a relationship with God made man. Our fourth doctrine summarizes centuries of reflection on the Word who is “truly and properly God and truly and properly man.” The One who is the source of all being began to be in the womb of Mary. All that is will find its true end in Him. Astounding.

Dennis Kinlaw poignantly noted that God could not save humanity from heaven. He had to come to where the problem resided, in the human heart. The only human person who was ever sinless took all sin and its consequences into Himself, and that had to be done in a body just like yours and mine. He has come to change us from the inside out. He came to take from us what we could never be rid of on our own. He chose to bear all of it – my sin, guilt and shame – in His being. And He began that restoration in the conception by the Holy Spirit in a teenage Galilean. God made man. Inconceivable.

This love, this desire to be with us, to share our life, to involve Himself with our “stuff” is difficult to comprehend. Once a year we find ourselves in a culture that waxes sentimental about a baby in a manger. What is missed is that there is no other god who would ever, out of pure love, get mixed up with the likes of us. Human nature in itself is a creation of God. It is our sinful nature that must be redeemed. Jesus does not remove our humanity to share His life with us. He took on our humanness to set us free. I was talking to a person addicted to sex recently and I was intrigued that the most helpful idea was that Jesus had taken on a body. To one who felt that he had no control over what his body demanded, there was hope in the fact that Jesus wanted to be near him, bodily. It was the very body of Jesus Christ that gave him power. The proof that He loves us as humans is that Jesus retains His human body for eternity. It is not much of a deal for the Incarnate to get all of my junk. His flesh is more than a problem solver. He has become one with me so I can become what He has created me to be. It is an amazing deal for me! Incomprehensible. 

Hundreds of years ago a church father, Jerome, preached a series of sermons on Christmas. His concern was that Gnosticism, the enduring heresy that the spirit is better than the flesh, could easily cloud the power of the humility of God in the incarnation. It still shakes us to honestly believe that God the Son would become dust, as we are. Of the borrowed manger in which Jesus was to be born Jerome wrote, “He was not born in gold but in the midst of dung and in our sin more filthy than dung.” That is a fairly graphic description of our state without Jesus and illuminates the extent to which our God has descended to make His holiness known in hearts like ours. One who was without flesh assumed ours. He took it. He shared it. He felt it. He knew it. And He still does. Pride never offers salvation, only humility can bear the weight of sin. Breathtaking.

A missionary in India found himself next to a Hindu scholar while taking a train trip. As the conversation deepened the westerner was surprised that he felt free to talk about the distinctive of Christianity – that God assumed our flesh. But he was shocked when the Hindu man said, “That is nothing unique. We have multiple thousands of gods who have become incarnate!” The American sat there in dismay until a thought about Christmas enabled him to respond. “Where did your gods become human?” The dialogue partner piped back, “Oh, there was no particular place or time. They are just ideas. Incarnation is simply one of our beliefs.” The missionary was encouraged as he discerned the radical difference between ideas and facts. Dorothy Sayers wrote of the incarnation, “It is the only thing that ever really happened.” Stunning.

The scandal of God being conceived in a particular womb, born in a borrowed stable in Bethlehem of Judea, is almost unspeakable. The Incarnate Christ is not a myth or a mere idea. Salvation can only occur in time and space. Transformation must be personal from beginning to end. And that Person who makes us persons again is God the Son who became Mary’s son. May it be that each of us meets Him again face to face. He has spared no personal expense to offer us Himself. Almost unbelievable … almost!

Questions to ponder

• Do your heart and life align with what the Holy One desires and enables?
• How does seeing the Bible’s big picture of holiness change how you see your relationship with God?

This article was originally titled “An Almost Unbelievable Humbling” in the December 2024 issue of The War Cry.