The Creed: "He Came Down from Heaven"

The Incarnation is the equivalent of D-day in salvation history. This is the moment when God stormed the beaches of time and space to invade "occupied earth" and destroy an empire that. dwarfs the Third Reich: the devil's empire of sin and death encompassing the whole world.

We arc taught that God the Father made everything "through" the Son: that Christ is the "Wisdom" of God imaged in Proverbs who crafted the world alongside the Father in sheer delight.

That often disturbs modern people who wonder how, in a universe of billions upon billions of galaxies filled with billions upon billions of stars, God could possibly be interested in the affairs of some harried bipeds crawling around on a grain of sand called earth.

"Man is tiny compared to the size of the universe," they complain. However, as G.K. Chesterton pointed out long ago, man is tiny compared to the nearest tree. So what? What does size have to do with anything? The real distance God had to cover had nothing to do with space (a meaningless concept when God is infinite). It was the distance between his holiness and our sin.

Some will call this narrow-minded false pride and claim that Christians foolishly believe humans arc better than all the other civilizations with which (we moderns assume) the universe must surely teem.

But., in fact, this overlooks the actual reason for the Incarnation. God did not become man because we are so wonderful but "for us men and for our salvation." It is our wretchedness that drew the attention of divine compassion. He came not to say, "Way to go!" but to rescue us from the disastrous pit into which we fell at the dawn of time.

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This is one of the reasons why Jesus was horn of a virgin—it serves as a living reminder that we didn't earn our salvation and that the initiative was entirely with God alone. Our very prayers for the coming of God into the world and into our lives are, themselves, a gift, from him just as

Mary's immaculate sinlessness was a gift from him, not an achievement of hers.

The Virgin who gave birth to Jesus had a name and face. Although she is iconic, she was not an icon, nor a faceless, nameless Earth Mother. She was a young Jewish girl, born of the last people on earth to think of pagan Earth Mothers and Sky Fathers. And she believed not in some vague pantheism hut in the God of Israel. She was real and human, not a myth.

Like mother, like Son. From her, the Word took on flesh and refused to stay up in heaven. God became a creature whose diapers had to be changed. Scandalous? You bet! But that is the Christian claim. And if it doesn't shock you, you haven't been listening!

The Incarnation has always been a hard doctrine to believe. There is something so dullingly ordinary about what our senses present to us that we figure there just can't be anything miraculous about things and people who we see every day.

Somehow, the knowledge that Jesus was fully human made it impossible for many hearers to believe that he could he anything special—even when they had just seen him perform the miracle of the loaves and fishes_ They asked one another, "Is this riot Jesus, the son of Mary, whose father and mother we know?"

This curious inertia still afflicts us today. And yet the same Holy Spirit that wrought the Incarnation or the Son of God in the Virgin's womb is still at work in the present moment—right where you arc sitting, if you like—impregnating human beings with the life of God and growing Christ again in the hearts of men, women, and children all over the globe.