The Scandal of the Incarnation

Growing up, I remember a church near me that put on a “Nativity Walk” every year. They built an elaborate set where visitors would visit ancient Bethlehem and hear rumors that something strange had happened. You’d start with some stories about wise men, then be stopped by a Roman official who would charge your guide a tax. You’d then wander through the town, culminating in finding a lowly barn that would suddenly light up with angelic light to reveal the holy family, including a real baby in a manger. Even many years later, memories of that event still powerfully shape my imagination.

That was one of the reasons why I was so blown away a few years ago to read the argument made by Kenneth Bailey in Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes. Bailey points out the issues with the standard story. For one, Joseph and Mary are in the line of David. It’s strange that they’d have to come to their ancestral town only to be turned away by everyone in a deeply hospitality-oriented society. Further, the word that we typically see translated as “inn” is instead the word for the guest room inside a traditional ancient middle eastern house. Those houses usually consisted of a large common space with a single separate room. The main area even included feeding troughs near one end so that animals could be brought in to provide warmth at night. In fact, when I took out my trusty ESV, I noticed a footnote in Luke 2:7 that suggested that Bailey was right.

So what? Well, according to Bailey, this means that Jesus likely wasn’t born in a barn. It also means that He wasn’t born in particularly unusual circumstances. He wasn’t born as a social outcast; Jesus was most likely born in the presence of a loving extended family in a typical home.

Although all Christians celebrate Christ’s incarnation—­the truth that God took on ordinary flesh­—we often imagine the incarnation in ways that make Christ more extraordinary. He can’t just have been born to a humble family; He must have had the most humble of beginnings. He can’t just have been rejected as the savior and crucified; He had to have been outcast in almost every way from the start. It’s almost as if, were we to possess a time machine, we would travel back and see a little glowing halo around Jesus’ head, just like in church iconography.

There’s no doubt that Jesus is unique and special, and there’s no doubt that He was despised and rejected, but one of the side effects of the ways we try amplify this narrative is to make Jesus just a little less human. Rather than the perfection of humanity, He becomes something a little more out of reach. As we use Christ’s divine nature to elevate His human nature beyond the merely human, we open ourselves up to a number of creeping errors.

First, such an elevated Christ can start to feel out of reach. Rome has long put an emphasis on Christ’s divinity that has led congregants to look for other mediators to help connect them to the Mediator. The pope recently clarified Catholic doctrine to reject the notion that Mary serves as a mediator and co-redemptrix with Christ. While they still maintain that Mary has a special relationship to Christ such that her prayers are more valuable and efficacious than ours, they recognize that her role has continued to be further elevated since the Middle Ages such that she has come in some places to seem like the more approachable, human, avenue to connect to God.

Second, an elevated Christ can seem like one who leaves His ordinary physicality behind. No matter how nit picky we might be that the hope expressed in Revelation is in a New Jerusalem, I imagine most of us still talk about “going to heaven.” Humanity has always longed for a connection to something higher. Most religions offer some way to transcend the physical, and Christians have often shared that longing. Since the early church, believers have longed to see the face of God, but we have varying senses of what that means. In the thought of eminent theologians like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, true happiness is beholding God without the blinders of the material world dimming our vision. They both affirm the Biblical insistence on our bodily resurrection, but neither views our embodiment as particularly important for the enjoyment of the age to come.

This is the scandal of the incarnation, and it’s something that affects us more than we admit. In its fullest sense, the incarnation is offensive to those who can’t imagine a higher being descending to mere materiality. Many early heresies shared this concern and rejected a Christ who was fully human. Even for those of us who do hold to orthodoxy, we often imagine a Christ who descended to help us one day ascend and leave the distraction and misery of materiality behind. There might be a New Earth to go with the New Heavens, but we’ll be so busy hanging out with God that we’ll ignore all that physical stuff.

Yet, there is another strain of Christian tradition, one that runs through ancients like Irenaeus and Athanasius and up through more modern figures, like Abraham Kuyper. This recognizes that through Christ, not just humanity, but the whole cosmos is reconciled to God. Rather than needing to overcome our materiality in order to see God, we come to see Him through the works He has done. The blessing offered to us in the incarnation is nothing less than the chance to see God face to face, especially in the person of Christ. However, the promise we enjoy is also the ability to truly behold the glory of God revealed in the material world. We get to relate to God both in Christ and through the world. It’s an invitation to participate in the vibrant life of the New Jerusalem that rightly centers us in our core relationships not only to God, but to our neighbor and to His Creation.

This Christmas, we can celebrate the incarnation of Christ, the extraordinary, ordinary miracle of a God who so loved the material world that He created that He would come down to redeem it and dwell for a glorious eternity in deep fellowship with it. And we get to live right in the middle of it.