The entrance of the Son of God into the world is the most consequential event in all of history. Whatever we previously thought it meant to be human is fundamentally changed—very much for the better—by the discovery that our nature is completely compatible with God’s nature. Whatever we thought it meant to be God is also changed—and again, this change is for the better—because we now know that God is love, that God is communion. And of course, these discoveries about the two natures of God and man are an improvement over whatever went before simply because they are also true.
We often say that Jesus became like us in every way except for sin. And this is undoubtedly true, well-attested in the Scriptures and in the Tradition. But this qualification about sin obscures something of earth-shattering importance: sin is not natural to human beings; sin is a corruption of human nature. I will return to this in a moment, but for now, let us note that human nature is compatible with the divine nature, so long as that human nature is freed from sin.
When I said a moment ago that the Incarnation changes our knowledge of God, we should note that it is a change foreshadowed by God’s history with the human race. There are two aspects of this history, at least as I would like to tell it to you this evening. The first is the gradual realization of human beings that God is utterly transcendent. This realization was quite an achievement; most cultures are content to have a provincial idea of God. Ancient peoples were fine with there being multiple gods, and were apt to switch allegiances when one god seemed more powerful than another. It is the genius of two different cultures, the Jewish and the Greek, that they gradually came to understand that for God to be truly godlike, there could only be one, and this God must be somehow greater than the universe. When I mention Greek culture, really mean a small, radical subculture of Greek philosophers who derived the notion of monotheism.
Such a God is terribly powerful, and yet both the Jews and Greeks intuited that God is also just and true and therefore is not given to arbitrary displays of power. Here, though, is where the two cultures diverge. For Greeks like Aristotle, God withdraws into an inaccessible solitary bliss. For the Jews, God is puzzlingly close to the downtrodden, exiles, widows and orphans. They knew this because they experienced it. The Jews were conquered in turn by the Babylonians, the Macedonians (after being liberated by the Persians), then by the Romans. We hear this evening that Joseph and Mary needed to travel to Bethlehem to satisfy the
taxing strategy of Caesar Augustus. They are an occupied people at the moment that God appears as a child of a Jewish woman.
Throughout all of these tragedies and disappointments, God did not abandon His people, and this suggested that God was somehow a God of love. This was abhorrent to the Greeks. Love makes us vulnerable, and gods by apparent definition, can never be weak or vulnerable, and certainly not the supreme God. Love seems to imply that we need someone else, and God cannot need anything.
And so when we peer into the manger tonight and see God, the Son of God, as a vulnerable infant, dependent utterly on His Mother for sustenance and nurturing, this is a radical discovery about God, that He really loves us so much that He is willing to offer Himself to us, to placed in our arms, on our tongues. This is, strangely, who God is, and yet when we think of it, it rings true. It somehow confirms what we had not dared to hope, that all of creation, good as it is, beautiful as it is, is yet gratuitous, a grace a gift from a God Who loves us, and made us for Himself. He is not a God Who dominates, Who pulls rank. He is not first of all a scold, a gaslighter Who claims to love us while pointing out our every flaw. He is love pure and simple, vulnerable and waiting for us to say, “Yes, I love you, too.”
All of these insights we could derive from the Christmas story. But what about our response? Is the Incarnation something we celebrate today because it happens to be the anniversary of Jesus’s birth? Is it something that God did once upon a time, and now He no longer Incarnates Himself? Clearly this isn’t the case, and here is where I return to a thread I left off a few minutes ago. I said that sin is a corruption of human nature, and we know this because the perfect union of the human and the divine is in a sinless man. Jesus is not an isolated example of sinlessness. He is the beginning of our sinlessness, our union with God. In the words of Saint Athanasius, “God became man so that man might become God.” We are invited to follow the example of the Virgin Mary, and by the invitation He gives to us in baptism, to welcome the life of Christ in our hearts, to be transformed by love, and, let’s be honest by vulnerability, that sin might be rooted out of us, that we might die to ourselves so as to live the divine life of Christ. This can be a scary proposition for sure, but this night we have this assurance from God: He loves humankind so much that entered completely into our human world, with all its typical concerns, struggles, joys, heartaches,
boredom, insight, whatever we experience as human beings, Christians experience with God as our eternal partner in love.