Incarnation: What it means that Jesus Christ was born into this world

In Jesus Christ, God is fully revealed in a fully human person, a two way revelation reverberating throughout all of time, showing truths about God and about humanity. It is only fitting that we have birth narratives involving choirs of angels and visiting royalty. Not because it actually happened that way, but because of the significance of such an event. In order to live a fully human life, Jesus had to be born just like every other human being and this is worth celebrating in grand fashion. This birth must also have been extraordinary in some way, a miracle and a sign pointing toward something greater than human existence. Thus we get a virgin birth, not all that uncommon in the mythos of the Greco-Roman world. Whether this can be proven to be historically factual or not does not really matter. The story is compelling and reveals truths about God anyway.

There is a wealth of possible meaning that can come from God choosing to be revealed in a fully human form and yet remaining fully God. Classic Christian theology teaches that humanity has so utterly failed to be as God intended that God came in Jesus Christ as part of a divine rescue plan for humanity. A more progressive interpretation is that the incarnation reveals and affirms the essential goodness and worth of humanity and God's love for humanity as it is, warts and all. There is truth in both of these approaches to the incarnation and they are not necessarily opposed to one another. Yet, it is not solely about the sin or the goodness of humanity. These are important theological concepts, but we can and should dig a little deeper.

The incarnation is a profound statement about the freedom of God to intervene in the course of human history. God could come in all out apocalyptic rage, turning everything upside down and reducing it all to desolation. Prophets have been giving this kind of message as long as civilization has been around and it always remains a possibility. But God chose something different in Jesus Christ. God began a special revelatory intervention as helpless as any human infant. The gospel writer Luke takes it even further by setting his birth in a hole in the wall for animals in an overcrowded city bursting at the seems with weary travelers. Hardly the "silent night" that we like to sing about.

Theologians use the Greek term kenosis to describe the emptying of the divine self in order to take on human form in Jesus Christ. This metaphor relies on an assumed multi-tiered cosmology, where humans are considered a lower form of being than God, who is assumed to be the highest and purest form of being. However, this should not primarily be understood as a blanket judgment on the depravity of humanity. Rather, it should be understood that God chose to let go of certain divine qualities, at least for a time, in order to become human. Something about God changed in this unique revelation and yet it is a general theological assumption that God cannot change. This is part of the huge paradox that the Chalcedonian formulation addresses.