The Incarnation Of The Word

The Incarnation of the Word

I love the accounts of the nativity, the birth of Christ that we find in the gospels. I love the story, I love lingering with the story, I love its innocence, its directness and its simple beauty.

I also love it because I love understatement.

Before going to seminary I was trained as a jazz musician and composer and one of the things you learn repeatedly and have to apply consistently is the idea that ‘less is more’;

that you say more musically when you keep it simple and subtle, as simple as it needs to be, when you cut out the fluff, when you understate rather than overstate.

Now I see the Birth of Christ, or the Nativity, as the grandest understatement of all time.

I say that because at one level what occurs in the manger is what has happened at some point in the life of every human being.

We were all born, present company included! And Jesus is born to a mother and a step-father in a way that we could say was also understated in terms of the dignity we would expect such a birth to occur in.

Peel back the simple melody of that story of the birth of Jesus just a layer or two and you get the true story, the story that hints at ‘why’ of the extraordinary importance of this thing that we call the nativity, or the Incarnation.

John 1:14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

This is another telling of the Nativity, but different of course from the Nativity passages found in the other gospels.

This is what is really going on in the understated events in the manger.

St. Augustine said: “He was created of a mother whom He created. He was carried by hands that He formed. He cried in the manger in wordless infancy, He the Word, without whom all human eloquence is mute”.

“The Word” here in the koine or ancient Greek is “Logos". And what the word “Word” means is at the heart of the matter.

The Word, or Logos means the communication, the sayings and the moral teachings of God.

It means the personal wisdom and power in union with God, it means God’s minister or agent in the creation of and the governing of the universe, the cause of all the world’s life both physical and ethical.

It means the self-revelation of God. In describing Jesus as the word, St. John’s gospel presents Jesus not only as the One Who gives God’s Word to humans, He IS God’s Word given to humans.

He is the true word-ultimate reality revealed in a Person. The Logos is God.

And, John states, the Word became flesh. The Logos of God, which previously existed somewhere humanly undefinable, un-enfleshed, un-embodied, much as God the Father is…the Logos of God actually clothed Himself in human skin.

He bound Himself to human bones, and all the physical inner parts, the muscle and skeletal system.

Not to mention all the complex emotions that define what it means to be human.

God’s whole and complete person was given birth on that starry, night in Bethlehem in the infant Jesus.

Colossians 2:9 For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form NIV, Colossians 2:9 For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. KJV

That is why the Nativity is the grandest understatement of all time.

And the pathos of this understatement is unpacked just a few verses late in John's gospel: John 1: 10 He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. 11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. 12 Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God--13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God. 14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

The truth is that the child born in the manger 2000 years ago made the universe we live in.

But when that child came to us, when the Logos, the Word came to earth as a helpless infant, and when that child grew to manhood, very, very few would recognize Him.

By and the large, the world wouldn’t even notice, and when it did finally, as it sorted through its various reactions to the Logos, to this Presence, we see that the world He was born into, the world that was made through Him, was somehow blind to Him.