In the name of the Word made flesh – Jesus Christ. Amen.
The facts on the ground are that on December 16, 1773, members of the Sons of Liberty boarded a shipping vessel in the Boston Harbor and threw 342 chests of tea in the water. Seen from the British perspective, a lawless mob destroyed property and caused hardship for businesses and consumers alike. This was an unnecessary and violent act of terrorism. From the perspective of many colonists, this was a group of patriots standing up to tyranny and burdensome taxation after their petitions were ignored. This was a necessary stand against oppression and began the path towards liberty. How we tell the story changes the story.
When it comes to the story of Christmas, how we tell the story will impact not only what we say today, but what faith is all about. The facts on the ground are that in Bethlehem, sometime around the year 4 BC, a young girl named Mary who was betrothed to a man named Joseph gave birth to her firstborn son, and Christians believe that this child was the God of Israel in the flesh. This event is called the Incarnation.
One group of Christians, those in the historical majority, say that God came in the flesh to do for us what we could not do for ourselves, namely do what was necessary for our sins to be forgiven. The Incarnation was God’s act of coming to us because we needed to be saved from sin. Another perspective is that from before time, God intended to come into Creation as a culmination and sanctification of that act of creating. The Incarnation was the fulfillment of God’s purposes for Creation in this view. How we tell the story changes the story.
To put it more simply, was the Incarnation God’s eternal plan or was it something like a “In case of irredeemable sin, break glass and put on flesh”? Is God more like an architect or EMS?
For most of the Church’s history, the loudest voices have said that God is more like EMS personnel – someone who comes in response to an accident. In this telling of the story, God created the world in goodness, but because humanity sinned and fell, we needed a divine rescue. God began by calling a people to this work of restoration and gave them God’s perfect Law to follow. But that didn’t quite get the job done. Because sin had infected everything, we weren’t able to receive the medicine that God gave us in the Torah and Prophets. So, God did the only thing left to do, come among us and become the atoning sacrifice for sin that we could not be for ourselves. Notice that this story has God being reactive to humanity and puts the problem of sin at the center of the story. It follows the most basic story telling plot – there is an incident, the Fall, that leads to building conflict until we arrive at the climax, the Cross, which resolves the tension and leads to the final resolution of all things. If that’s the story of faith you grew up with, or believe today, I’m not saying that it’s bad, wrong, or incomplete. But it’s only one way to tell the story.
Another way to tell the story is that God is an artist who has conceived of a grand project and is bringing it to its culmination. Like the other way of telling the story, God also created the world in goodness and human sin, while not an intended part of the design, is something incorporated into the story instead of needing to be erased. The design of this story has always been for God and humanity to dwell together in the Garden. It’s what we read in Genesis 2, and it is the vision of Revelation 21: “See, the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them.” The Incarnation is how God joins humanity to divinity, both on the cosmic level and in our very own lives. The promise of Emmanuel, of God with us, was never a backup plan, it was the original design and intention for Creation. And though this view might be in the minority, it’s the one that Scripture points towards and is distinctively Anglican.
Maximus the Confessor was a 6th century monk and scholar who wrote that “Christ was always destined to come.” Given God’s desire and intention for union with us, it makes all the sense in the world, and in heaven, that God would come among us in time and space. In Ephesians, we read that “God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world,” suggesting that before Creation, before humanity, before any sins, we had already been chosen in Christ. The reading from Hebrews this morning also gestures towards this, “Through the Son, God also created the worlds.” And the epitome of the Christmas and the Christian story is the first verse of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word.”
The word “beginning” means at the root or origin of all things. Jesus did not come about because God looked at Creation and said, “Oh boy, they’ve really mucked this up. I better get down there and do something.” No, Christ was before was was. And “word” means a lot of things: logic, pattern, rationale, or overarching structure. So another way of translating John 1:1 is “Before anything happened, God had a design” and then moving to what might be the most load-bearing verse in all of Scripture, John 1:14, “This design was put into human flesh.” Which means that the Incarnation is essential, not accidental.
Duns Scotus was a Scottish friar and theologian in the 1200s who wrote a lot about Jesus as the eternal plan of God. He wrote, “The Incarnation begins from above, not from below. It begins with God. It is not that the highest good,” meaning Jesus, “is something that was merely occasioned only because of some lesser good,” meaning our sin. In other words, Jesus was a good enough plan to enact without a problem to solve. The idea of Emmanuel was grand enough to not need a rationale other than God’s loving desire to be with us.
He further writes, “The Logos, by essence God, became a messenger of this plan when he became a human…displaying the very goal for which his creatures manifestly received the beginning of their existence.” What Duns Scotus helps us to see is that the whole story is for the love of God to overflow into Creation and for us to be in harmony with God. The purpose of Creation is our union with God.
It’s a story driven not by sin or fixing a problem, but the culmination of Creation is the glory of God and friendship with humanity. As St. Athanasius put it in the 300s, “God came into humanity that humanity might become God.” Yes, in the Incarnation sin is forgiven and death is defeated – God can resolve the tension of more than one story at a time – but this alternative way of telling the story means that the image of God that we are created in is perfected when God merges the divine and human images in Jesus.
The 19th-century Bishop of Durham said that this harmony is the fulfillment of Creation’s purpose. That’s the story that our Anglican tradition has leaned towards, but our wider culture, which has a louder voice, has tended to tell that other version. And just like the example of the Boston Tea Party, how we tell the story becomes what the story means.
There are three reasons why seeing Incarnation not as a backup plan is important. The first is that it helps us to resist the urge to turn Jesus into Superman – someone who comes from another planet with superpowers to be our hero and the fixer of our problems. That’s a very utilitarian view of Jesus. Instead of being a comic-book hero or someone we call only in an emergency, it is as we sang in verse four of our opening hymn: “For he is our lifelong pattern.” It’s not just that call on Jesus when we are in trouble and need something, but he shows us the path of wisdom, he draws us closer to the love of God, he teaches us more about the design of love which is the grain of the universe and the way we are to walk in.
And this leads right into the second benefit to seeing the Incarnation as something destined from before time – it allows us to become more fully human. Jesus did not come to save us from our humanity, but rather to allow us to grow more deeply into it. This is why St. Paul and many theologians since have spoken about Jesus as the New Adam. In becoming human, Jesus sanctifies what it means to be human. And Jesus brings his divinity into the Incarnation, thereby blessing all that we experience in life – joys, sorrows, regrets, loneliness, anticipations, and celebrations. Again, we sang, “Thus he feels for all our sadness, and he shares in all our gladness.” Because of the Incarnation, God is with us in all of these human moments. Disappointments become opportunities for solidarity and laughter, brokenness becomes occasions of growth and grace, and blessings become things to share in gratitude.
The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, wrote, “Jesus is the heart of Creation, the one on which all patterns and stories converge to find their meaning.” What the Incarnation, when viewed as the holy design of God, gifts us with is the fullness of our humanity. Because God became human, we can also become more deeply human by embracing all of life just as God embraced all of the human experience.
Lastly, the Incarnation as an intention of God shows us just how deeply and lovingly God desires to be with us. Turning to the hymn at Communion, verse two is “Isaiah ‘twas foretold it, the Rose I have in mind, with Mary we behold it, the Virgin Mother kind. To show God’s love aright, she bore to us a Savior, when half spent was the night.” The Incarnation shows us that there is no limit to what God will do to come to be with us. God takes on the vulnerability of our flesh. God comes knowing full well how we treated the prophets and messengers of God. God is born anticipating that before the story comes to Resurrection, that it will include the tragedy of the Cross. And yet, God comes because the design of all things is to be with us, no matter the cost. The Incarnation is a demonstration of the love that has no boundaries or prerequisites. This love is for you – the whole plan of God is to go as far as it takes to embrace you in love. And it is the coming of this love that unites us fully to God and thereby makes all things well. God has chosen not only to save us, but to be with us in the deepest and fullest sense of that word, so that we might deeply and fully be with God.
How we tell the story matters. The story of Christmas is not the story of God fixing what went wrong, it is God bringing to fruition what was always meant to be. As we sang, Christmas tells us the grand story of God’s design from before time, that “Love came down at Christmas, love all lovely, love divine. Love was born at Christmas.” Indeed, love was born at Christmas, and we are made fully alive. Amen.
