Incredibly Immanuel
Our family has blessed with the addition of a new baby this year. As I look into the face of my three and a half month grandson at this time of celebrating another Baby's birth, I find myself especially reminded and stunned by the audacity of this incarnation. Incredible. Immanuel.
We sing of Mary and Joseph, of shepherds, of all the others who looked at both this child and up into the sky with the unprecedented signs of angels and stars and pronounce with them the wonders of the event. Meanwhile however, God, the God who made the stars, the skies, all that is and was and ever will be, this loving God had allowed his Son to become a baby who, in his human nature, would have looked up at all around him with the same wonder as any other baby discovering his mother's face, his hands, the wonders of grasping at blankets, of learning that smiling and gurgling are ways to communicate in the most basic way with those around him.
When you hold a tiny baby, have you ever wondered what they are thinking as they lay there, gazing intently at everything around them? I once read that researchers have found that the onset of childhood memories is related directly to the age at which we begin to talk. It is as though there has to be a verbalization externally before our brains are able to register and remember events. Without words, we cannot formulate the narrative of memory. The God who made us, who has held each and every infant in his hands, he was aware of this...and yet, he sent his Son into just such a tiny, unfolding body. The Word made flesh, making his dwelling among us (John 1: 14) and now not able to verbalize for months--incredible!
A baby, just like all others, one who cried, who needed to have all his needs met by others...helpless, dependent and needy.
But not at all like all others. This was, after all, the "fullness of the Deity living in bodily form" (Colossians 2:9). Even there in that little manger bed, "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together." (Colossians 1:15-17a)
Incredible! Those little eyes, blinking in the light of the sun that he had made, squinting in the darkness looking for the stars that he had himself hung in space. And yet, because of the Father's love, this divine Son became a baby locked into a human body that would limit his awareness to what we ourselves were limited to as babies.
Writing from prison near the end of his all too short life, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wondered at this same incredible gift:
Immanuel. God with us. That first Christmas night, Christmas in 2012, and forever more.
Incredible! Joy to the world!
We sing of Mary and Joseph, of shepherds, of all the others who looked at both this child and up into the sky with the unprecedented signs of angels and stars and pronounce with them the wonders of the event. Meanwhile however, God, the God who made the stars, the skies, all that is and was and ever will be, this loving God had allowed his Son to become a baby who, in his human nature, would have looked up at all around him with the same wonder as any other baby discovering his mother's face, his hands, the wonders of grasping at blankets, of learning that smiling and gurgling are ways to communicate in the most basic way with those around him.
When you hold a tiny baby, have you ever wondered what they are thinking as they lay there, gazing intently at everything around them? I once read that researchers have found that the onset of childhood memories is related directly to the age at which we begin to talk. It is as though there has to be a verbalization externally before our brains are able to register and remember events. Without words, we cannot formulate the narrative of memory. The God who made us, who has held each and every infant in his hands, he was aware of this...and yet, he sent his Son into just such a tiny, unfolding body. The Word made flesh, making his dwelling among us (John 1: 14) and now not able to verbalize for months--incredible!
A baby, just like all others, one who cried, who needed to have all his needs met by others...helpless, dependent and needy.
But not at all like all others. This was, after all, the "fullness of the Deity living in bodily form" (Colossians 2:9). Even there in that little manger bed, "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together." (Colossians 1:15-17a)
Incredible! Those little eyes, blinking in the light of the sun that he had made, squinting in the darkness looking for the stars that he had himself hung in space. And yet, because of the Father's love, this divine Son became a baby locked into a human body that would limit his awareness to what we ourselves were limited to as babies.
Writing from prison near the end of his all too short life, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wondered at this same incredible gift:
No priest, no theologian stood at the manger of Bethlehem. And yet all Christian theology has its origin in the wonder of all wonders: that God became human. Holy theology arises from knees bent before the mystery of the divine child in the stable.
Without the holy night, there is no theology. "God is revealed in flesh," the God-human Jesus Christ—that is the holy mystery that theology came into being to protect and preserve. How we fail to understand when we think that the task of theology is to solve the mystery of God, to drag it down to the flat, ordinary wisdom of human experience and reason! Its sole office is to preserve the miracle as miracle, to comprehend, defend, and glorify God's mystery precisely as mystery. (from God is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas (Westminster John Knox Press, 2010)
Immanuel. God with us. That first Christmas night, Christmas in 2012, and forever more.
Incredible! Joy to the world!
posted by hl at
10:28 AM
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