Advent & Incarnation

Friday, December 20, 2024

Anyone who grew up in an even remotely liturgical church community has heard of Advent. The rest of us have seen Advent calendars, with tiny doors concealing tinier candies. And anyone who has seen Christmas Vacation knows Advent is when Clark Griswold spreads mayhem and puts up far too many Christmas lights.

What is Advent? It is the liturgical season which begins the church year and when we prepare for Christmas. It runs from the first Sunday in December through sundown on Christmas Eve, when the season of Christmastide officially begins. The purpose of Advent is to wait in anticipation for the coming of God into the world in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, but we are forever rushing Mary to push that baby out so we can open our presents. Instead, we need to push back against the holiday rush and make time to meditate on the mystery and gift of the Incarnation. Our cultural ADD makes it a struggle to “treasure all those words and ponder them in our hearts.” And there is a lot to ponder.

Imagine how you would react to an archangel appearing in front of you—the first thing they always say is, “fear not.” Zechariah gets trashed because he doubted Gabriel (he was struck deaf and speechless while waiting for the birth of his son, John), but Mary also struggled with her angelic annunciation, and, let’s be honest, we would have too.

Luke 1:11-13, 18-20 NRSV Then there appeared to him an angel of the Lord, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was terrified; and fear overwhelmed him. But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John.
. . .
Zechariah said to the angel, “How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.” The angel replied, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.”

Luke 1:28-30, 34 NRSV And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God . . . Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?”

And after Jesus birth, she still had a lot to think about:

Luke 2:15-19 NRSV When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.

Questions pile on questions—we might ask along with Mary, how can a virgin have a child? How can the Creator become part of the world that they created?1 How can a God of spirit become human? What makes us alive? What is the essence of who we are? Even then there were questions about the nature of the soul and the body2—there were notions of the flesh (sarx or σάρξ), of a life force (psyche or ψυχή], and of spirit (pneuma or πνεῦμα), that was of the same substance as the Divine. And the incarnation was a puzzler—if it was difficult to speak of spirit and body, then what of a divine spirit and an earthly body?

Contemporary science argues that our physical body is integral to our consciousness—our thoughts are expressions of biological processes, and mind can’t be separated from body. Christianity has come to an uneasy truce with this science, understanding the Incarnation theologically as the perfect melding of God and humanity—the hypostatic union, to be exact. Jesus had two natures that were one nature, distinct and yet inseparable. Finding words to describe it is an exercise in oxymoron. It’s a bundle of paradoxes tied up in red Christmas ribbons.

So what is this scriptural bundle telling us? My takeaway is that the idea of almighty God coming to earth as one of us (Immanuel) is disturbing and frightening and hard to understand, and the best news humanity has ever heard.3 We’ve domesticated it with familiar stories and cozy manger scenes, but it’s still hard to get your head around. God is depicted in the Hebrew scriptures as mighty and holy—the sort of holy that could get you killed if you came too close. Yet, God is also depicted as loving and gentle—the Incarnation really is good news. Thankfully, we don’t need to nail down the specifics of our christology to appreciate its grace and mystery. My belief is that if Christianity is worth anything, it’s because it teaches that Jesus was God with us.

The mechanics of the incarnation may be a puzzler, but its implications are profoundly practical:

I’m not saying Jesus made God manageable—if anything, Jesus brought an unmanageable God uncomfortably close. We try to make the transcendent safe—God as an abstract concept sits politely in a corner of our mind—but a spouse with morning breath or an exhausting child will not be ignored, and God is present in them as well. I think that’s why Advent and the Incarnation stick with me so—they are messy and real. Jesus didn’t come as God cleaned up and dressed in his sabbath best. Jesus came as one of us, an ordinary guy to all appearances.

During this season, I’ve been reading through the meditations in Honest Advent by Scott Erickson, and I’ll close with a brief quote that I think encapsulates the promise and challenge of meeting all the manifestations of Immanuel around us:

The Giver of life hides revelation in the things we ignore because it is the work of humbling ourselves and asking to have eyes to see and ears to hear that truly transforms our hearts.

Scott Erickson, Honest Advent

Let us open our eyes and ears and be transformed.

Postscript I write this on December 28, in the calm after the storm. I still have lots of questions, but they no longer seem as pressing. Still worth asking, so . . . .

I don’t know, and perhaps it is better to have good questions than certain answers. That’s what I’ll be pondering this advent.

  1. That seems hopelessly self referential (the creator becoming created), and if I’ve learned anything about logic, self reference is bound to create a paradox. A self existent creator cannot be created. A first cause cannot be caused. ↩︎

  2. I’ve written about this in more detail in my State of Faith essay, and it probably deserves an essay of its own. ↩︎

  3. It’s also Christianity’s beating heart. Atonement (Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sins) gets way more ink than the incarnation because hell fills pews. If you believe Jesus came to save us from the hell we create rather than the one God is gleefully rubbing his hands together in anticipation of sending us to, then it makes far more sense for him to have come to build loving relationships than to to be divine asbestos. ↩︎

  4. Who the heck was Epicurus? He was a Greek philosopher who taught that although the gods exist, they have no involvement in human affairs. His teachings have continued to affect much of western thought, especially our belief in the fundamental separation of the spiritual and material. See History and Eschatology by N. T. Wright for an extended discussion of Epicurus’s influence ↩︎

#incarnation #advent #christmas