“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” John 1:1, 14
When we think about the coming of the baby Jesus to earth, too often we are thinking only of the cute little baby, the gentle mother Mary, the faithful father Joseph, the animals in the barn, the hay, the star, the angels. But do we think about it as the incarnation, the coming of God into the physical realm of the body and the earth, to bring His deity into a place and time, to walk among them as they walk in history, sharing the physical world with the very creatures He had made?
That angel choir at Jesus’ birth sang one performance in all the history of the earth, and who was the audience? Sheep and simple shepherds, not musical elites. God’s highest values are to the lowly and humble, and He paid attention to the individuals of that particular moment in space and time. This shows God’s sense of values and His character more than we like to think.
Through the specifics of the incarnation, we can feel invited in, from our own specifics and our own locality, into the flesh and blood specifics and the locality of the manger of Bethlehem. God started His walk on earth as a man, in a place that was not one of perfect genetical ancestors, nor godly governmental institutions, nor perfect circumstances, according to anyone’s ideas of what that might mean. The DNA of Jesus’ genealogy was full of badly behaving and weak people, just as much as it was full of kings and leaders. Yet, the God of the universe chose to become man in that DNA, in that family, in that place in time. Despite that humble beginning—or because of it—He accomplished His purposes.
From all of this we can be sure that as we walk out our lives on the earth in our space and time, we can follow Jesus, the God who went before us. In following Him, we can walk like He walked, do what He would have us do, speak and think as He did. Why can I say that?
Because He came and put aside His riches of glory and walked in the most humble and not-perfect of circumstances, in a specific locality in space and time—a real place, with real people. Childhood playmates, family, friends, tasks. Someone sat in chair he made as “the carpenter’s son.” He ate food: some He liked, some He did not. Some of the girls He grew up with probably hoped that someday they might become Mrs Jesus.
He lived out a life for 30 years in a body that was just like ours, but He had a divine purpose for doing it. The wonder of it, is that God wanted to come and be like us in our weakness so that He could serve our sentence for us before the justice of God.
