Category Archives: The incarnation

Christmas, Incarnation, The incarnation, The Story

The unexpected visitor

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Highlights from my message from Week 22 of The Story: The Birth of Jesus

I wonder if you have ever had an unexpected visitor? have ever had someone turn up at your door completely unexpected and unannounced. If you could speak to my wife’s parents they would tell you of a strange day a few years ago. A day when someone arrived at their farmhouse – a house in the middle of their farm, a farm which is 45 minutes walk from the nearest bus stop. A bus stop that is about an hour from Lockerbie, which is about three hours from Edinburgh. Well as they stood there doing the dishes after lunch a strange man appeared walking towards them with a smile on his face – coming to see them with a message just for them.

Have you guessed it? Yes, that man was me and the question was – “can I marry your daughter?“! I had booked the day off work and travelled all the way to their farm in rural Dumfriesshire to surprise them and ask for permission to marry their daughter. Do you know what they did? They laughed!

Well in this passage we encounter a similar unexpected guest. This time not with a question, but with an answer. The guest is not a dreamy eyed, idealistic, naïve, love struck young man, but a radiant angel. Not this time with thoughts of hopeful marriage, but of a centuries -long promised birth, not to ask permission but to announce God’s certain purposes.

21 weeks we have been walking through the Old Testament – ups and downs, mainly downs?! Now 400 years of silence and then…BOOM God breaks through. How would we get on waiting 400 years for something? We can’t even wait 4 months! How does a people wait longer than their own lifetime for a promise? Through tradition – stories passed down, poetry recited, songs sung – woven into the fabric of the culture. The weaving keeps them alive, but also “represents” the promises, rather than actually being the same thing. Things are emphasised, other things are pushed to the background, until finally it all becomes folklore and myth. Just a sweet story to tell your children when they can’t sleep, or tell yourself when you are broken by life.

A folklore had developed around the “Messiah”. A warrior king, in the pattern of David to restore the nation of Israel. This is what the people wanted, it what they expected, but it is not what God had in store, at least not how they expected to be rescued.

It would seem that we have a built in desire to believe that somebody one day will rise above the limitations of our human state. We tell stories to each other about a single individual, born at a special moment in time who will change the course of history. One with special abilities, in harmony with nature, able to rise above the mundane, able to overcome our limitations, one that represents humankind, but is not destined to live as just another human.

maxresdefaultSo we read it in Lord of the Rings – prophecy of the coming king Aragon

The prophecy in Star Wars – the one who will restore balance to the universe, Anakin Skywalker

The prophecy in The Matrix – the chosen one Neo

But all these are fictional, they are Just a fairy tales. Is this only The stuff of films and literature? Where does this desire for a hero come from? I would say that These are all echoes of the original – the One who will come and change our reality. In the same way that our obsession with romantic films echoes the desire in our hearts for a soul mate, so this recurring theme echoes a divine longing that God has put in each of us.

So, the unexpected visitor arrives at our front door and says, get ready, He (capital H) is coming…

he is coming in your lifetime you will see him Mary, 

He is coming with your eyes you will see him Mary

He is coming your arms will hold him Mary

He is coming your body will nurse him Mary

He is coming your womb will protect him Mary

He is coming to your town, to your family, to your body…you are so blessed, so fortunate, so privileged

The promise Adam heard in the garden you will see fulfilled

What was whispered to Abraham in the night sky you will embrace

The vision that overwhelmed Daniel will hold your little finger

The wisdom that formed the earth you will teach to read

What a moment in her life! What a moment in history, this is the defining moment of history, when everything changed, when all our hopelessness was banished forever. Do we wonder at this event? I pray that God would break our familiarity with this great event, that he would free us from years of Christmases.

I want God to break through our hardness and numbness to the incarnation. To really, really contemplate it for just a few minutes. To hold it up before you as something beautiful, like a jewel in the light, that you might marvel at its radiance. Oh that God would help me do just that – who is sufficient for such things? To do justice to the moment when the Son of God – who has no beginning and knows no limitations, squeezed himself into a human body, to forever identify the creator with his creation, to overcome our corruption with his perfection, to breath our air and feel our pain…as a real live human being!

Book II, Calvin's Institutes, Eutyches, Institutes of Religion, John Calvin, Knowing God, Nestorius, Servetus, The incarnation

Two natures, distinct but united

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Screen Shot 2017-12-29 at 16.41.13Book 2 Chapter 14  Section 1-8

In the previous chapter we considered why the incarnation was necessary for the salvation of mankind. But how did this work in practise? How does the Creator inhabit a creature without losing something of either the human or divine natures? Calvin addresses these issues in this chapter and asserts that when we say the Word was made flesh “we must not understand it as if He were either changed into flesh, or confusedly intermingled with flesh but that He made choice of the virgin’s womb as a temple in which He might dwell.”  Indeed, Christ became man “not by confusion of substance, but by unity of person.”

Calvin maintains that the “entire properties of each nature remain entire, and yet the two natures constitute only one Christ.” In attempting to illustrate how two substances can exist without confusion, Calvin draws our attention to our own natures, which consist of both body and soul. Although they exist simultaneously in the one person, each is distinct yet perfectly united.

When we turn to how Jesus describes himself, and how the NT authors describe how these two natures dwell in one person, we find that there is a number of ways used to communicate these truths. Calvin recognises that they:

1. Sometimes attribute to Him qualities which should be referred specifically to His humanity. This is when Jesus’ human attributes are demonstrated, such as when he weeps beside Lazurus’ grave or confesses He does not know the last day.

2. Sometimes qualities applicable primarily to His divinity. This describes times when Jesus’ is described as divine. For example when Jesus said “Before Abraham was, I am” in John 13.58 this clearly could not refer to His humanity, but rather His divinity.

3. Sometimes qualities which embrace both natures, and do not specifically apply to either. Here is where Calvin says “the true substance of Christ is most clearly declared”. This is most common in John’s gospel, with numerous examples of Christ’s work as the Mediator exhibiting both the human and divine natures. When we read of His “having received power from the Father to forgive sins; as to His quickening whom He will…as to His being appointed judge both of the quick and the dead…are not peculiar either to His Godhead or His humanity, but applicable to both.”

4. Sometimes communicate the two natures with each other without specifically referring to them (this is known as “a communication of properties”). One example of this is when Paul states that Christ purchased the church “with His own blood” (Acts 20.28). As Calvin says “God certainly has no blood” but as Christ shed His blood on the cross for us, the acts which He performed in His human nature are transferred to his divinity.

Calvin finishes by refuting the false teaching of Eutyches, Nestorius and Servetus regarding the person of Christ. They taught that Christ either had two natures (Nestorius) or that He was a fusion of two natures and wasn’t fully God or man (Eutyches) or that Christ was a “figment composed of the essence of God, spirit and flesh” (Servetus).

Response

Studying Calvin’s understanding of the person of Christ has brought fresh light to many familiar bible passages. It is so easy for me having accepted the two natures of Christ for many years to miss the full impact of the concepts the New Testament writers are trying to convey. The idea of the one and only God shedding His blood for us was bizarre to a first century Jew and should shock us to think of it as even being possible. And yet it happened.

How can an eternal, all powerful God die? Only by somehow entering into frail human flesh could the death of God become remotely possible. This is a mystery, for we know that it is impossible for the God who sustains all things by the power of His word to die.  Because of His love for us God found a way to enter into the theatre of creation, to fully experience life as a human and then willing submit Himself to the ordeal of death. What wisdom to even devise such a plan of salvation, what love to set it in action and what determination to see it to the bitter end.

“Since the children have flesh and blood, He too shared in their humanity, so that by His death He might destroy him who holds the power of death – that is, the devil – and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” Hebrews 2.14-15

Father, our minds cannot fully grasp how it was possible for the Son of God to become the Son of Man and yet we believe and know that Jesus is the Christ. Thank you for freeing us from the fear of death, for He has gone before us and broken its power. We praise your wisdom, power and mercy for such a wonderful salvation, Amen.

Book II, Calvin's Institutes, Institutes of Religion, John Calvin, Knowing God, The incarnation

And the Word became flesh

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Screen Shot 2017-12-29 at 16.25.24Book 2 Chapter 13 Section 1-4

Having established that it was necessary for our salvation for Christ to become man in the last chapter, Calvin moves on to argue against those who deny the full humanity of Christ. He argues against the ancient heresies of the Manichees and Marcionites who taught that Christ was “invested with celestial flesh” or only appeared as a “phantom” without a real body, respectively.

Marcion imagined the Christ assumed a phantom instead of a body because it is said that He was made in the likeness of man (Philippians 2.7). But the context of this verse is the humility of Christ in the face of His right to glory and honour. The point is that Christ was willing to appear as if he was only a man and nothing more, even though the truth was very different.

The Manichees dreamed of an aerial body because Christ is called the second Adam, the Lord from heaven (1 Corinthians 15.47). But, as Calvin argues “the apostle does not there speak of the essence of His body as heavenly, but of the spiritual life which, derived from Christ, quickens us.” Indeed, this very passage is one of the strongest in support of the real physical body of Christ as Paul argues repeatedly that our future resurrection from the dead is intimately connected with whether Christ’s real, physical, flesh and blood body rose from the grave.

The other points used to demonstrate the real and full humanity of Christ are that:

  1. The phrase “seed of Abraham” is directly applied to Christ by Paul (Galatians 3.16). This is not an allegorical statement but echos the promise made in Genesis 3.15 that the seed of the woman would crush Satan’s head.
  2. He was subject to physical infirmities. Jesus exhibited the full range of human physical needs and emotions – laughter, crying, being tired, frustration, jubilation, and disappointment.
  3. His portrayal in scripture as having experienced our weakness (Hebrews 2.11, 17; 4.15). Why would we be exhorted to consider Christ as being sympathetic with our human frailties if He never really became human?
  4. He was born of a woman (Galatians 4.5). Although His conception was supernatural His gestation within the womb and birth was just as any other human. He did not arrive on a cloud from heaven, but through the same means that we all arrived on this world.

Response

The mystery of the incarnation is profound. The bible clearly teaches that Jesus Christ has a fully human and fully divine nature in one person. But what this must have been like to experience is clearly beyond our human minds. What must it have been like for the eternal second person of the trinity to have experienced life on earth for the first time? To be hungry and satisfy that hunger with food, to feel the wind and rain, to feel the pain of torture and the agony of death.

And yet His two natures never became confused or contradictory. The eternal Word became flesh, but still sustained creation every moment. “The Son of God descended miraculously from heaven, yet without abandoning heaven; was pleased to be conceived miraculously in the Virgin’s womb, and yet always filled the world as from the beginning.”

 “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet was without sin.” Hebrews 4.17