Some two millennia ago, there was born a child.\u00a0 The circumstances surrounding his entrance into the world were, to put it mildly, modest.\u00a0 No less modest were the two Jewish peasants who were the first to greet him\u2014his parents. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Yet in spite of the obscurity in which he was born and raised, by the time this child\u2019s brief stay of some three decades on this Earth would come to a close, he would have made an indelible impression on his world.\u00a0 Those who knew him and many who knew of him would come to conclude that the helpless, shivering infant whose birth the powers of this world tried mightily to frustrate was none other than the <\/em>God of all <\/em>that is. <\/em><\/p>\n By now, the story of the birth of Jesus, the <\/em>Christmas story, is well known to the approximately two billion <\/em>people the planet over who regard the world\u2019s most famous babe in a manger as God Incarnate.\u00a0 Still, while the proposition that we are that much the better for this familiarity is true, it is only partially true.\u00a0 When something becomes too <\/em>familiar, the danger that we will lose sight of it becomes imminent.\u00a0 Whether it be a close friend, a spouse, a job, or even a child, familiarity breeds, not necessarily contempt, but more assuredly, negligence.\u00a0 Thus, in order to minimize the risk of inoculating ourselves against the awe of the Christian narrative of the Incarnation, we would be well served to take time this Christmas season to reflect upon the birth of the most significant figure to have ever taken the world stage. Only if we do so shall we understand, and appreciate, just what an amazing story it is.\u00a0<\/p>\n Only by reflecting upon this story will we recognize, first, that the Greatest Story Ever Told is also the most paradoxical and, secondly, that the paradox in question is insuperable.\u00a0 The recognition of these facts promise in turn to lead us to that of a third: only if the story is true <\/em>would anyone have thought of relaying it.<\/p>\n Christianity is the offspring of Judaism.\u00a0 Jesus\u2019 apostles, family, friends, and Jesus himself were all Jewish.\u00a0 All of the evidence that we gather from the Gospels and the Epistles of the New Testament overwhelmingly support the thesis that Jesus never had any intention of founding a religion distinct <\/em>from the Jewish tradition from which he derived his very identity.\u00a0 \u201cI have not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill <\/em>it,\u201d he assured those, friend and foe alike, who questioned his relationship to Judaism.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is a crucial consideration to bear in mind when attending to the Incarnation, the idea that God <\/em>became a human being.\u00a0 As students of the world\u2019s religions have long noted, mono<\/em>theism is among the greatest contributions that the Jewish faith has made to the religious imagination, to say nothing of the life of civilization itself.\u00a0 It was this fierce monotheism that prevented Jews, at one time, from even ascribing a proper name to God, and it was this monotheism that accounts for why Jews treated idolatry\u2014the worshipping of false gods\u2014as the gravest of transgressions.\u00a0 There was but one <\/em>God.\u00a0 Any other gods making claims to our allegiance had to be pretenders. \u00a0<\/p>\n Yet in the first century, a Jewish man comes along and equates himself with this one God.\u00a0 It is no wonder at all why his Jewish enemies recoiled in horror and blasted him with the charge of blasphemy.\u00a0 It is a great wonder indeed, though, astonishing, in fact, that his Jewish relatives, his Jewish friends, and thousands <\/em>and thousands <\/em>of his Jewish disciples affirmed <\/em>his self-identification.\u00a0 The enterprise of deifying human beings was as commonplace throughout the ancient world as was the poly<\/em>theism from which it was inseparable.\u00a0 But the Jewish world was another matter entirely.<\/p>\n The story of the Incarnation, then, isn\u2019t the story of how a god <\/em>became a man.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t the story of how an instance of one kind of finite being became an instance of another kind of finite being.\u00a0 The story of the Incarnation is the story how God\u2014<\/em>the One <\/em>and Only <\/em>God\u2014assumed the flesh of a Jewish <\/em>man.\u00a0 It is the story of how Being <\/em>itself became a human <\/em>being.\u00a0<\/p>\n Infants are the most vulnerable and powerless members of the human species, and yet it is in an infant that Omnipotence became incarnate.\u00a0 Infants are more ignorant than all other humans, and yet it is in an infant that Omniscience chose to dwell.\u00a0 Infants experience more changes, and more rapidly, than all other humans, and yet it is to the flesh of an infant that the Immutable chose to join Himself.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The story of the birth of Jesus is a paradox, not just because it is a story, initially told about a Jew by Jews, in which the Universal and the particular, Being and a being, the Infinite and the finite, don\u2019t just intersect, but actually become one.\u00a0 <\/em>It is a paradox as well because of its insistence that God became a human being by reason of His sheer love <\/em>for us.\u00a0<\/p>\n God did not decide that He would take up residence, if you will, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.\u00a0 Had He done just this, there would have been no Incarnation.\u00a0 <\/em>It is the Incarnation, though, that conveys more powerfully, more unmistakably, God\u2019s unadulterated love for us, for by becoming like us \u201cin all ways,\u201d God sought to know first hand what it was like to be <\/em>one of us.\u00a0 So, He began His human existence where we begin ours.\u00a0 And, like us, He passed through infancy.\u00a0<\/p>\n God didn\u2019t inhabit <\/em>Jesus\u2019 body and soul.\u00a0 He became <\/em>Jesus.\u00a0 He was, <\/em>He is, <\/em>Jesus.\u00a0 Jesus is the God-Man who entered the world as a baby and endured infancy so that, ultimately, by knowing and redeeming our nature, He could reconcile us to Himself.<\/p>\n This Christmas season, let us do our best to lose some of our time worn familiarity with the story of the birth of Jesus so that we can once again, or maybe even for the first time, rejoice <\/em>in this event upon which world history pivots.<\/p>\n Jack\u00a0Kerwick, Ph.D.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some two millennia ago, there was born a child.\u00a0 The circumstances surrounding his entrance into the world were, to put it mildly, modest.\u00a0 No less modest were the two Jewish peasants who were the first to greet him\u2014his parents. \u00a0 Yet in spite of the obscurity in which he was born and raised, by the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n