Faith Matter 23: For The Gardner News, December 30, 2006
The Word Became Flesh
Christmas isn’t just a day in the church calendar, it is a season. In the spiritual life, the twelve-day season of Christmas reminds us that what we celebrate on December 25th is not just an isolated birth in an obscure province of the Roman Empire 2000 years ago. Christmas celebrates the incarnation, a transformation of the world and the way we understand God.
As the poetic prologue of the gospel of John says, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The transcendent God of the universe, the Creator of all that is seen and unseen, the One in whom we live and breathe and have our being, took on flesh, and entered into the world, transforming it and transforming us. The incarnation is the central sacrament of our faith, the transformation of physical creation through the abiding presence of the unseen God. For Christians, the incarnation becomes the lens through which we see and understand the mystery of God.
God became Emmanuel, a Hebrew name meaning “God with Us.” “The Word”, God’s purpose or intention, became embodied in Jesus, the Christ, God’s Messiah. In Jesus we come to understand God’s closeness to us in a new way, a God who is with us in our lives and in our hearts each and every moment. Jesus is the embodiment of our deepest desires for God, the answer to our spoken prayers and even to the deep unspoken desires of our hearts. Jesus is the answer to our prayers for ourselves, our loved ones and for our world: our desires to be loved unconditionally, no matter what we have done or left undone; our desire to be healed and made whole; our desire to trust completely in God’s care for us and those we love.
This incarnational understanding of God is very different from the old, “philosophical” conception of God that still lives on in the minds of some. For them God is the “cosmic watchmaker” who created the world and its physical laws and properties. But having set the world in motion, this God stands at a distance, uninvolved, watching as the world runs its course. For others, God is purely spirit, disembodied, distant. God may be present, but is uninvolved with humanity or even with creation.
Through the incarnation, we know and understand God in the person of Jesus Christ, with whom we are invited into a personal relationship. In him God is revealed to us, present to us, visible to us. Our lives are linked to Jesus Christ through the sacrament of baptism. His Spirit, the same Spirit he shared with God, is in us. Together we are his earthly body. Through the incarnation God is revealed as immanent, in each and every moment, in each and every person.
The incarnation shapes the way we understand and live in this world. It opens us up to see God’s sacramental presence in every moment, in the physical as well as the realm we call spiritual. Through a long-ago moment in a small town in Judea, the world was changed and we were changed. God became flesh and dwelt among us, and our eyes and hearts were opened in new ways to see the glory of God among us and with us and in us. This is what we celebrate in the season of Christmas and throughout the seasons of our lives.