Merry Christmas!
Today the Son of God took on flesh.
It’s a phrase that seems so plain and uninformative until you actually think about it. God took on flesh! How the hell did he do that? Doesn’t it sound complicated for a formless Super-being to take on fragile restricting human flesh? To give Jesus, a being that never had a beginning, and construct him out of the very atoms he was brilliant enough to design, inside a woman he had already imagined and built with his words! It’s one thing to create a human out of nothing, but to take someone who was already alive and real and transliterated his omnipotent mind and condense it into the completely inferior human brain. How incredible it is that God was able to build a body for Jesus that can provide the emotional intelligence required for Christ’s immense love! I cannot fathom how massive a downgrade Christmas morning must have been for Christ.
To God we must seem pathetic creatures. Our creator gave us his image but not his full power, nor, for that matter, his full wisdom. For although we are rulers of this world we are still of it, and so we must bend to its physics and chemistry. We have but five or six senses which are limited, it seems, to the immediate surrounding space-time. We so quickly succumb to infection and diseases which continues to evade us even now with medicine so highly advanced. We grow weary and need to sleep for at least seven hours a day to stay healthy. We receive practically all of our energy from The Sun which is hardly self sufficient.
Even our ability to look after and shape this world is limited. After-all there are some things God has not yet given us authority over, gravity among the least of these. Indeed we are attracted to The Sun and The Sun to us whether we like it or not. Human live and die moving with the endless cycle of time. We decompose and our graves feed to plants that we eat. The atoms that make up our bodies are recycled every 7-10 years. We are totally reliant on the universe around precisely because we are designed to be. We are part of creation, designed to protect and shape the universe around us. The universe is as reliant on us as we are on it precisely because we are made of the same stuff. And for as long as you are made of this stuff you are a slave to it. And yet, these are but the restrictions that our God took on when he took on flesh that Christmas morning all those years ago. What a sacrifice!
Would you willingly take on the form of a slug in order to save the slug population? I myself don’t care about slugs and why would I? They are useless animals that could never do anything for me. And yet the difference between a slug and me must be a fraction of the difference between me and my God. Despite this, our lord took on human from for us!
When we say God gave his Son for us, that is no small sacrifice. No small gift.
It gives the season of giving a new meaning when you think about the plain boring phrase “God took on flesh.”
God gave up his strength so that we might be strong.
He gave up his authority so that we would not be crushed by our own.
He gave up his life so that we might live forever.
jjawThoughts 