DrIBEX Ideas

The title sounds a bit shocking, doesn’t it? But Christmas Flesh is the real message of the Nativity season. We evangelicals emphasize so strongly that Jesus was DEITY incarnate that we forget to think through what it meant for Him to come in the “flesh” (John 1:14 and 1John 4:2). “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). The Word who is Life, the Word who is Light, the Word who is Love has become “flesh.”

The Christmas message, embodied in one statement, is that the Word became Flesh. Real, breathing, skin-covered humanity as the Act of Redemption begins to unroll before our eyes.There is a big theological word to describe this: Incarnation. God becomes human and, to quote Eugene Peterson, “moves into the neighborhood.” God becomes what we are — humans — so that we might become what He is (2Peter 1:4).

Evangelicals who are ignorant of early church history (most of us!), may not realize that the earliest heresy about Jesus was not the denial of His deity - that did emerge in the fourth century - but it was the denial of His real humanity. The name of that heresy was Docetism - that Jesus only appeared to be a man. John 1:14 puts the lie to Docetism, as well as two other early heresies (Adoptionism and Arianism).

But our purpose in looking at John 1:14 is not primarily doctrinal, but devotional.

Christmas flesh means an absolute identity: God has become what we are. God does not “appear” to be human or “gets transfigured into the physical” — both of these deny absolute identity with humanness. He must be man so He can be the Mediator between God and men - “the man Messiah Jesus” (1 Tim 2:5).

Chrustmas flesh means an absolute transformation: God becomes what we are, not to show that it can be done, but to take up our case, our being, our “cracked icon-ness.” Here the Crackedness begins to back up, to roll back its curse and its pain and its sin (Scot McKnight).

Christmas flesh means an absolute promise: God becomes what we are as a gift so that we, by taking in this Word-now-flesh might become what God wants us to be: God’s children.

Flesh does matter. God doesn’t just redeem our spirits or our souls or our minds. The Gnostics would be happy with that kind of redemption (as were the heretical Gnostic gospels). He becomes fully what we are: flesh-and-blood humans, so that all of our human condition - body, soul, and spirit - might be redeemed. Becoming Flesh is the Point of the New Creation. The New Creation is the Incarnation, and all those who are in the Incarnate One are part of that New Creation.