Incarnation--The Ultimate Christmas Gift

The amazing thing about Christmas is that it demonstrates God’s desire to play in our back yard. We are at once God’s playground, God’s playmates, and God’s children. God is parent, companion, and Creator. God wants to act in us, through us and with us.

And the cost of this incarnation is unimaginable. Think about having infinite possibility at your disposal and deciding to limit yourself to our mere human capacities, our frailness, our fallenness, our death. God knew the cost of incarnation was pain, suffering and death. But God also wanted to see Creation through our eyes--to revel in a sunset, to feel the touch of a warm breeze on bare skin, to know the love of family and friends. And so God came to us, and became one of us-the babe, the son of Mary.

In our flesh, through the God/Man Jesus, God accomplished perfect love and compassion in a way that we could never have done and removed the barriers that stood between God and humanity. Jesus managed to hear and understand God through and in spite of his humanity and to live God’s will in spite of an incomplete knowledge limited by human capacity, saying of certain things that he did not know the answer but only the Father knew. Jesus demonstrated for us the power possible within the limits of human life when that life is united with God’s spirit. And he invited us to live such a life, one powered by Holy Spirit.

Prior to the coming of Christ, the Spirit was not a constant presence in human life, not the ever-available tether to God which came to us and for us at Pentecost. But thanks to God’s self-sacrificing incarnation, we now have the ability (although attenuated by our sin-tainted natures) to live lives constantly connected and united with God. That is the awesome consequence of incarnation-the priceless gift of Christmas.