The incarnation (God taking on flesh as the man Jesus) is the most spectacular instance of cultural identification in the history of humankind. The Son of God did not stay in the safe immunity of heaven, remote from human sin and tragedy. He actually entered our world. He emptied himself of his glory and he humbled himself to serve. He took our nature, lived our life, endured our temptations, experienced our sorrows, felt our hurts, bore our sins and died our death. He penetrated deep into our humanness. He never stayed aloof from the people he might have been expected to avoid. He made friends with the dropouts of society. He even touched the untouchables. He could not have become more one with us than he did. It was the total identification of love.
The following quotation from Philip Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew helps me to get under the skin of the incarnation!
“I learned about incarnation when I kept a salt-water aquarium. Management of a marine aquarium, I discovered, is no easy task. I had to run a portable chemical laboratory to monitor the nitrate levels and the ammonia content. I pumped in vitamins and antibiotics, and sulphur drugs and enough enzymes to make a rock grow. I filtered the waters through glass fibres and charcoal, and exposed it to ultraviolet light. You would think, in view of all the energy expended on their behalf, that my fish would at least be grateful. Not so. Every time my shadow loomed above the tank they dove for cover into the nearest shell. They showed one “emotion” only: fear. Although I opened the lid and dropped in food on a regular schedule, three times a day, they responded to each visit as a sure sign of my desire to torture them. I could not convince them of my true concern.
To my fish I was deity. I was too large for them, my actions too incomprehensible. My acts of mercy they saw as cruelty; my attempts at healing they viewed as destruction. To change their perceptions, I began to see, would require a form of incarnation. I would have to become a fish and “speak” to them in a language they could understand.”
If we compare Christ’s mission with the Apollo mission to the moon, they are both cross cultural journeys – heaven to earth, earth to moon. They differ in the degree and extent of the identification involved. The Apollo astronauts never identified with the moon – if they had attempted to do so, they would have been dead in a moment. Instead they took the things of earth with them – oxygen, equipment, food and clothing. When Jesus came from heaven to earth, he left everything behind. He brought only himself. This was no superficial touchdown. He became a human being like us and so became vulnerable like us.
Although Jesus identified with us, he did not surrender or in any way alter his identity. He became one of us, yet he remained himself. He became human but without ceasing to be God. That’s what made the incarnation so powerful. Now he sends us into the world, just as the Father sent him into the world. As Christians, we are called to be incarnational as we help others to understand the good news of Jesus. It demands identification without loss of identity. It means entering other people’s worlds, as he entered ours, though without compromising our Christian convictions, values or standards. The idea is that this incarnation should also be powerful! Christians are called to be the people in our communities who are good to be around, who are compassionate, entering into other people’s heart worlds, and thought-provoking as we enter into other peoples’ thought worlds.
It is time for the church to recapture some of the wonder of Christ’s incarnation as we identify with others in a way that has the potential to bring the love of God into the lives of our communities. Let’s flesh out Christ’s vision in our part of Wiltshire!