Advent: December 16 – Human Beings Become Human Because God Became Human

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.
1 Corinthians 13:11–12

The image of Jesus Christ is formed within people. People do not develop a form of their own, separate from him. Instead, the image of Jesus Christ shapes them and sustains this new form within them. This is not about copying or repeating his image exactly, but about people discovering their own true form through him.

This transformation does not turn people into something foreign to them or into the form of God. Instead, it shapes them into their own form—the one that truly belongs to them and is part of their very nature. People become fully human because God became human, but they do not become God. This change is not something people could create for themselves. Only God, by taking on human form, makes it possible for people to become what they were meant to be—fully human—without becoming God.

In Christ, the image of humanity before God was made new. This renewal was not about where people live, their time in history, their race, culture, religion, or personal preferences. Instead, it was about the essence of human life itself. In Christ, humanity saw its true image and its greatest hope. What happened to Christ happened to all humanity.

The whole Christian story is strange. Frederick Buechner describes the Incarnation as “a kind of vast joke whereby the creator of the ends of the earth comes among us in diapers.” He concludes, “Until we too have taken the idea of the God-man seriously enough to be scandalized by it, we have not taken it as seriously as it demands to be taken.”
But we have taken the idea as seriously as a child can. America is far from spiritually monolithic, but the vast backdrop of our culture is Christian, and for most of us it is the earliest faith we know. The “idea of the God-man” is not strange or scandalous, because it first swam in milk and butter on the top of our oatmeal decades ago. At that age, many things were strange, though most were more immediately palpable. A God-filled baby in a pile of straw was a pleasant image, but somewhat theoretical compared with the heart-stopping exhilaration of a visit from Santa Claus. The way a thunderstorm ripped the night sky, the hurtling power of the automobile Daddy drove so bravely, the rapture of ice cream—how could the distant Incarnation compete with those?
We grew up with the Jesus story, until we outgrew it. The last day we walked out of Sunday School may be the last day we seriously engaged this faith.

Frederica Mathewes-Green,
At the Corner of East and Now

^{Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. God Is in the Manger : Reflections on Advent and Christmas. Louisville, Presbyterian Publishing Corporation, 2012.}