Christmas Day, 2022

 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14).

Is that the way you would have done it? If you had been in God’s shoes, would you have surrendered your status as God in order to become human and enter the world you had created?

God was attempting to fix the brokenness of the world He had created. God had not created it in its broken state. What God had created was good, very good (Genesis 1:26). That good creation, however, had become twisted, corrupt, broken. The humans God had created in the divine likeness, with the capacity for God’s life, with the ability to use power as God does – humans who were the crowning piece of creation had corrupted creation through rebellious defiance (Genesis 6:5, 11-12). Their disobedience had created alienation and division in every possible relationship. Following their own wisdom, humans had filled the world with violence – using power in the exact opposite way God uses power. The world was broken because humans, acting out of willful defiance, had filled the world with violence.  

If you were God, how would you have dealt with human defiance and rebellion? How would you have gone about fixing the broken world? Would you have destroyed it and started over? The story of the flood indicates that’s what God did, but it didn’t work. Judgment did not change the human heart. The human heart was the same after the flood as it was before (Genesis 6:5 and 8:21). (Personally, I believe the story of the flood presented that option because that’s the way we humans generally operate, not because it is what God did. The story of the flood is an epic story communicating theological truth, not actual history.)

Would you have just given up on it and thrown it away? Again, we humans are inclined to give up on and abandon seemingly hopeless projects. Again, that’s not God’s way.

God’s way is to love.

God acted in harmony with the divine nature, living out of the divine character of self-giving love. In the face of human’s rebellious defiance and disobedience, God’s love never wavered. In the face of the world’s brokenness, God never gave up on or abandoned the world he had created. Rather, God loved because that’s what God does.

How far would God’s love go? How far would it take Him?

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

To heal the brokenness, to overcome the alienation and division, to bring reconciliation to broken relationships, to address the rebellion and defiance, God set aside the rights and privileges of being God in order to take on human flesh. God robed the divine self in the vulnerability and total dependency of a new born infant. In Jesus of Nazareth, God lived among us and with us, showing us what God is like and teaching us God’s ways – the ways for which we were created. In Jesus’s death and resurrection, God restored what we, in our stubborn willfulness, destroyed. By taking on our humanness, God addressed what was in the human heart, cleansing it and transforming it. God’s giving did not stop with the incarnation. Following Jesus’s resurrection, God gave the Spirit to be the continuing incarnation. Through the work of the Spirit, God is recreating us in the divine likeness once again. God, living out of steadfast, faithful love, will not stop working until our transformation is complete and the brokenness of creation is healed.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. That is how far self-giving love will go.