And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…full of grace and truth. (John 1:14, NKJV)

The first Sunday after Christmas is celebrated in the Christian Church as the Sunday of the Incarnation. It celebrates the coming of Jesus in the flesh and brings a deeper theological reflection on the reality of God becoming man than even the Christmas story. With all the attendant commercialisation of the Christmas story, the real message tends to get lost, and so Incarnation Sunday pulls us back to the sober reality of why Jesus came. The only sad reality is that the day is not given the prominence it deserves and may be treated as a “low Sunday” with poor attendance to match.

The passage that is prominently used at this time is John 1:1-18. It is referred to as the prologue to John’s Gospel and is itself a beautiful piece of literature as it is pregnant with theological meaning. At the time when John wrote, the body was regarded as an evil place in which the soul was entombed. The body was corrupt and flesh was despised. So when John wrote that the guiding, creative, dynamic Word became flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, this was a radical departure from the thinking of the day and one which could not be entertained by many in the emerging church. This gave rise to the Docetic heresy which taught that Jesus was just a mere apparition incapable of being touched with the infirmities of men.

But John was not embarrassed to state categorically that in the human Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us, the power which made the world and keeps order in it, the Logos (Reason) behind all that there is, came down to Earth and put on the tent of human flesh. By doing this He does not only illuminate the world with grace and truth but identifies with the existential realities of pain and suffering in the human condition. As William Barclay in his commentary on John’s Prologue notes: “In Jesus we see God living life as he would have lived it had He been a man.” If you want to understand the mind of God, you have to know the mind of Christ. When you see Jesus you see a representation of who God is, as a God of love who is prepared to divest himself of all power and glory and share with us in our weaknesses. Just as John and the early followers of Jesus were not embarrassed against great opposition to assert the incarnation of God in Christ, so must we in the Church today not be embarrassed to assert His humanity in our daily strivings. If the Incarnation means anything at all then it has to mean that God is not far removed from us; as Paul says in Him we live and move and have our being. He is no cosmic potentate riding on clouds of glory.

I know that all of this does not make any sense to the person who is searching for a scientific explanation of the Incarnation. Indeed, no such explanation is possible. It is not enough even to say that this is a mysterious event, if by mystery we believe that it is shrouded in darkness and is not capable of being understood by the human mind. It is mysterious only as a supernatural event that can be apprehended by faith. But there is no mystery to the fact that God cares deeply about us and that He continues to be the powerful, creative dynamic Word which presides over what He has created and whose wisdom is available to the nation and individual that would seek it.

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