If you are anything like me, you’ve been busy finishing up all the last-minute details before Christmas day arrived. Between putting out decor, baking cookies, sending out Christmas cards, wrapping presents, and squeezing in all the Christmas traditions you enjoy each year, you’ve had little time for much else. It’s a season jam-packed with activity and festivities. But in all the hustle and bustle, sometimes the moments of stillness and meditation get pushed to the back burner.
It’s ironic, really. This busyness that is so human prevents us from meditating on the moment when God became human.
So as the blur of Christmas passes us by, maybe this is that moment for you. Maybe you set aside just enough time to read this blog post and reflect on the reason we’re celebrating this Christmas.
The thing that has captivated my mind these past few years is the mystery of what it means for the divine to become human. Not only that, but the beauty in the process of becoming human. Jesus didn’t skip any steps. Mary was pregnant for nine months and went through all of the very human experiences of growing pains, morning sickness, and labor. And throughout Jesus’ life, he experienced hunger, loneliness, pain, and all the other things that comprise our humanity.
He took on physicality, and with it, limitations. He took on neuroplasticity, and with it, the necessity of learning as you go. He took on all the beauty and all the horror of being human.
Being human, in its very nature, requires that we are always “in process”. There’s a tension to that reality that often makes us uncomfortable, but the more I’ve learned and grown in my life, the more I’ve realized that it’s part of the deal. If I’m going to embrace my own limitations, lack of knowledge, and weaknesses in order to have God fill me, sustain me, and work through me, it requires that I cease believing I am ‘all sufficient’ or even that I have all the answers. Not surprisingly, God has never once asked us to be all-knowing, all-powerful, or everywhere at once. Those are attributes reserved only for him. But, in little ways every day, we try to be our own gods. We reject our humanity and try to supersede it. We want to overcome our weaknesses, become intellectually unconstrained, and defeat all limitations. And though we don’t always realize it, those things are a slap in the face towards a God who never intended us to be him.
In fact, he created our humanity with a purpose. As humans, we were made to be fully present (in the here and now), ever-growing, and dependent. The themes of surrender, weakness, or repentance in the Bible aren’t there by accident. When we embrace the most human parts about ourselves, we make space for God to be more of Himself within us. He is always fully himself and fully glorified, but oftentimes, our own selfish desires and unrelenting drives choke out any opportunity for our own souls to magnify Him like they were created to.
I recently saw a quote that said ‘our deepest humanity – that which is most personal, hidden, and precious about us is also, paradoxically, also the most universal.” Oftentimes, the feelings and sensations that we experience most deeply – the ones we feel we must never share because they feel too personal and vulnerable….those are the things that are most commonly experienced among humanity.
Vulnerability and humility are the crux of what it means to be human. These are two things that many of us spend our whole lives running away from. But in that running, we are also running from the deep goodness, profound peace, rich joy, and magnificent beauty that are offered in the process of embracing our humanity.
I truly believe that part of the call of every Christian is to “become human.” We must cease striving to be more god-like in our power struggles and superiority complexes and just be human. We need to answer more questions with “I don’t know” and we need to become more comfortable with the tension of discomfort.
And that, my friends, is one of the most significant components of the Incarnation. Jesus didn’t leave us to figure out this process alone. He entered into it with us. He became Emmanuel – God with us – because he so desired to be with us in the unfinished, rough around the edges, always changing process.
Why is embracing our humanity important?
Because Jesus did it.
The God of the universe became human.
The ultimate divine embraced the limitations of his own creation.
Yes, he came to die for our sins and resurrect to provide victory over sin and death. I don’t want to skip over that part because it’s the crux of the gospel, and the epitome of the biblical narrative.
And yes, we should look at that story as a story all about Jesus. I would be misleading you if I turned the manger and the cross into some sort of self-help technique.
But being weak, fragile, time-bound, location-bound, sinful, wounded, limited creatures that will one day die? That’s definitely not a very rose-colored way to look ourselves.
If you came here for rose-colored glasses, you’re out of luck. But if you came here to see yourself more like Jesus does, you might just find what you were looking for.
If being human was meant to symbolize a fight for power or a conquering of all weakness, Jesus would have done it.
But we don’t call Christ the King because he was born and laid on a golden throne. We call him king because He happens to also be the King of all Kings.
However, when that King took on human form, he was laid in a manger.
When that king became human, he somehow submitted to being pushed out of a human womb only to wail his first cries surrounded by nothing but livestock and some minimum wage workers from the hilltop nearby.
When the all-knowing king became human, he showed us that there is beauty in the process of learning and growing. As a teenager, the Bible states that he grew in wisdom and stature. And even with His great wisdom that baffled the religious leaders, as a 12-year-old, he was still eager to ask questions. Take that in: God became man and asked questions.
In each of these instances where Jesus embraced humanity – he didn’t need to. Was God capable of just downloading all knowledge in the universe to 12-year-old Jesus’ brain? Absolutely. Was he capable of lifting all human limitations so Jesus never got tired, never sprained a muscle, or never needed rest. He could have.
So with the knowledge that God is who he is, and with the knowledge that God didn’t have to do what he did, the only conclusion I can come to is that he did all this because he thought it was important and valuable. And if even Jesus thought embracing his own humanity was of great value, he must want to teach us something by the example he has set.
What does he want to teach you about becoming human?
It’s easy to think that we are somehow exempt from the process of becoming human, and it’s only Jesus that had to become what we already are. But how blind we are! It seems to me that Jesus was the most fully human of any of us. (please don’t read that as negating his full divinity…fully God, fully man) But in his own process of becoming human, Jesus fully embraced the tension of walking through the human experiences that we run away from. He was vulnerable, he was humble, he took on limitations, and he suffered. For in those moments especially, His Father was most glorified.
It was the manger that made the angel chorus stand out so much. It was the sweaty crowds and long journeys that made times of teaching or feasting seem so wonderful. It was all the moments that Jesus prayed to His Father to ask what was next that made his next steps so meaningful (John 12:49). And it was the cross that made the resurrection so glorious.
If something as painful as the cross can become such a significant moment in Christian history, why do we run from our own humanity like it’s some sort of plague? Why do we crumple up unfinished to-do lists so we don’t have to face the fact that there weren’t enough hours in the day? Why do we shirk away from our body’s signals of exhaustion, thirst, soreness, or pain so we don’t have to be reminded of our limitations? Why do we have tendencies like becoming a workaholic, a control freak, a perfectionist, a people-pleaser, etc so we can conquer our humanity with willpower and shame?
The invitation of the manger is one of being and becoming. If one of the greatest events of the gospel can happen in a stable, why do we put so much pressure on ourselves to become more like gods than humans? You hear it all the time in Christmas sermons…Jesus didn’t come for the kinds of people that had it all together and didn’t need him. He came for the shepherds and the widows and the suffering and the outcast and even the wealthy and powerful who knew they needed saving.
And in the process of saying “come to me all who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest,” he asks us to just be human and to let him be God. And when we overthink it or let that process feel way too complicated, we literally have a guide to reference because Jesus showed us the way and set the example. Phillippians 2 talks about his humility and urges us to become humble. Much of Paul’s writings ask us to put to death the parts of ourselves that are most drawn to the centuries-old deception, “and you will be like God.”
The incarnation is about so many things and so many books have been written on it’s significance. But the aspect that has captured my heart these past few years is the invitation to be weak without feeling shame, to be imperfect without fixing it, to be limited without chasing self-sufficiency, to be “in process” without feeling like I need to have all the answers, to be honest without needing to hide my shortcomings, to be vulnerable without needing to protect myself, to be tired and rest without needing to ‘get more done’, to be weary without needing to pursue coping mechanisms and to be human without needing to overcome the things that make me dependent on God.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be fully human the way Jesus was. I’m too scared of my own weakness and have too many fleshly responses to always feel comfortably unsettled in my humanity. But when I look at the story of Christmas, I am deeply moved. I am moved that even in the nine months before Jesus’ birth, divinity decided the process of growth and development was a valuable one. I am moved that his humble beginnings invite me to embrace the parts of myself that feel humble and unfinished. I am moved because the simplicity of a manger and some shepherds makes me realize that God can be glorified even in the mundane moments of my own life. And I am most moved because the God of the universe found it valuable to give us more than an instruction manual and a stern talking to. The God of the universe became man and dwelt among us, not only to save us (we like to skip to the end of the story and forget the uncomfortable moments of tension in the middle), but to be Emmanuel, God with us – the savior king who would rather walk alongside his people than be a passive onlooker.
May the truth and the beauty of Jesus’ incarnation remind you that he walks with you today through your weakness and fragility not so that the effects of evil, sin, and death can overcome you, but so that the King Savior can reign victorious over them and the Savior King can be right next to you in the nitty-gritty moments along the way.
