The wonder of the Incarnation

“Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.”

The miracle of the incarnation, God taking on a human body, cannot help but make us wonder.

In Luke chapter 1 we learn that Jesus’ mother, Mary, was a virgin, but she was told by the angel Gabriel, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.”

Jesus, from his conception, is one person with two natures: a human nature and a divine nature. The fancy term for this is the hypostatic union. This mystery is truly amazing.

Picture Mary placing the newborn, human Jesus, in the manger. In this one person is also the divine nature that has placed the stars in the heavens.

Mary sustains the infant Jesus while, at the same time, according to Hebrews 1, Jesus, in his divine nature, sustains not only Mary but the entire cosmos by his powerful word.

The Bible, Christ himself, and throughout Church history, the clear and unrelenting testimony is that Jesus was fully God and fully human. We can’t explain this mystery completely but we can wonder.

John writes in the Prologue of his gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. By John 1:14, we read, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”

Throughout Jesus’ life there are juxtaposed these wonderful truths of Jesus’ humanity and deity.

Jesus witnessed at his trial, when the high priest asked him, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?” Jesus replied, “I am, and you will see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.”

The Apostle Paul affirms in 1 Timothy 2,” there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave his life as a ransom.

In the atonement something had to happen to both God and man for the two parties to be reconciled.

God’s wrath has to be turned away, propitiated; and human sin had to be turned away, forgiven, expiated. So the Savior has to be both divine and human.

Anselm the Archbishop of Canterbury in the late 12th century, famously asks, “Why did God become man?” He answers, “ … only man owed the debt of sin, … And only God could make satisfaction for the debt of sin.” Hence, the mediator has to be fully God and fully man.

This Christmas, and this year, wonder and embrace the Christ child, the Son of God incarnate.

Crown Him the Son of God before the worlds began,

And ye, who tread, where he hath trod, crown him the Son of Man;

Who every grief hath known that wrings the human breast,

And takes and bears them for his own, that all in him may rest.