God Became Flesh

There is a moment near the beginning of John Gospel that I have never fully gotten over. The writer is building to something, layering image on image about the Word who was with God and was God, who was there at creation, through whom everything was made. You are bracing for something cosmic. And then the sentence:

The Word became flesh. Not the Word became an idea. Not the Word became a presence or a force or a voice from heaven. Flesh. A body. Elbows and lungs and a stomach that got hungry and a back that got tired. The eternal, uncreated God who made the universe compressed Himself into human form and was born in a stable to a teenage girl in a small town in an occupied country.

The theological word for this is the Incarnation, from the Latin for "in flesh." But the theological word makes it sound tidier and more abstract than it actually was. What actually happened is staggering.

What He Chose to Know

By becoming human, God chose to know things from the inside that He could have only known from the outside. He knows what cold feels like. He knows what it is to be so tired you fall asleep in a boat during a storm. He knows hunger, real hunger, not the comfortable Western kind. He knows the particular grief of losing someone you love. He knows what it is to be betrayed by someone you trusted, to have your closest friends fall asleep when you needed them most, to feel abandoned in a moment of darkness.

He was not sheltered from the hard parts of human life. There is no human experience of suffering that Jesus can only observe from a distance. He has been inside it. Not symbolically. Actually.

Tempted in every way. This means that whatever you are fighting, whatever the particular pull toward the wrong thing in your particular life looks like, Jesus knows what that feels like from the inside. He did not sidestep the human experience. He entered it fully. And He held.

Why He Chose This

God could have saved us without becoming one of us. He is God. But He chose not to. He chose the longest, most personal, most costly way. He chose to come in person.

I think about this a lot. When someone you love is going through something terrible, there are two things you can do. You can send a message, words of comfort, resources, advice from a distance. Or you can show up. You can sit with them in the hard place, physically present, sharing the weight of it. Those are not equivalent expressions of love. Showing up is the deeper one.

God showed up. The Incarnation is not just theology. It is God saying: I am not going to manage this from a distance. I am going to come in person, enter the thing you are inside of, and be with you all the way through it.

The Manger Is the Point

Christmas tends to be about the beauty of it, the star, the manger, the shepherds, the angels. And it is beautiful. But the point of the manger is the scandal of it. The God of the universe arrived in a feeding trough because there was no room for His mother in the inn. He began His human life in the kind of circumstances that most of us would call undignified.

That is not an accident. God did not choose a palace or a throne room as His entry point into human experience. He chose the bottom. He chose the margins. He chose the kind of birth that nobody in first-century Judea would have predicted for the King of kings. And He kept choosing the margins throughout His ministry: the tax collectors, the lepers, the Samaritan woman, the children no one had time for. He consistently chose the people the world had set aside.

He still does. Whatever makes you feel like an unlikely candidate for the attention of the King, you are exactly the kind of person He came for.

What This Means for Your Friendship with Him

You are not trying to connect with someone who has never been human. You are not bringing your humanity to a God who finds it inconvenient or foreign. He chose this. He chose to know what you know, feel what you feel, and face what you face. And because He did, you can bring Him anything, the exhaustion, the confusion, the grief, the fear, the very ordinary difficult days, and He will not be surprised by any of it. He has been there.

The friendship Jesus offers is not a connection across an unbridgeable gap. It is the friendship of someone who came all the way across to you.