Finding Hope in Suffering Through Beautyናሙና

Incarnation at Play

“What difference does the Incarnation make to the way Jesus saves us?”

That was the first essay question I had to answer when I began my study of theology, and I was surprised to find that I didn’t exactly know. I knew the story of the cross. I didn’t know as well the story of the cradle, of Christ taking on our flesh and living a whole, ordinary life, and what that meant to my own little struggle of human existence.

Before then, my understanding of salvation was mostly negative. I didn’t realize how profoundly this had shaped my sense of God’s work in the midst of my pain. I thought of Jesus’s life simply as the necessary condition for his death, and his death was what made the difference to me by settling a cosmic lawsuit on my behalf.

A few weeks of study brought me to an astonishing understanding: a God who dies for love may be a startling theological assertion, but perhaps even more astounding is the concept of a God who wraps himself in the flesh and blood, the sweat and tears of human embodiment and by inhabiting it, reveals the beauty for which it was created. Christ didn’t come just to settle some cosmic score with death; he also came to show us, in his own flesh, what humanity was intended to be and what it will again become by his grace.

The incarnation means that the life of the world began all over again in Jesus, and no part of our existence is left out of his redemption. What that means for us, what it meant for me, still struggling with OCD, still single and sick and edgy as I studied in a drafty Oxford library, is that redemption isn’t something that will happen someday. To be saved doesn’t mean to be evacuated from this body and this world and all the imperfect people within it. It means that all these things will be transformed as the life God intended us to have from the dawn of creation is restored to us in Christ.

To be saved means that, as Sam Gamgee said (in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Return of the King), “everything sad is coming untrue.” It means that salvation invades our lives as they are, here and now, shattered, difficult, tangled, and confused. Salvation is static in that it means that God has settled the ancient score once and for all. But it is also dynamic and active, a force of love invading the everyday and reclaiming the landscape of our bodies, our homes, our relationships, our minds, a power that both transforms and invites us to be part of the work that Love does in the world.

Make no mistake, redemption is local, and the kingdom of heaven arrives in our ordinary.

What do you think it means, not just in an abstract way, but in a day-to-day, experiential way, to see redemption take place?

Do you think there is any aspect of your life that isn’t caught up in God’s healing?

How could you take part in God’s kingdom as it arrives amidst your everyday life?