Immanuel

“Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.” ¹ It is Christmas Eve, and I am musing over Scripture, allowing visiting family members a break from their host. I am reliving the day centuries ago when God broke into human life as one of us. Was this event really the great gift of a savior prophesied by Isaiah, Micah, and Malachi? God incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth did make clear to all who would hear him that he came not to judge us but to save us. ( see Jn. 12: 44-47 for example). Clearly, though, he was not the savior envisioned by the prophets Isaiah, Micah and Malachi, who saw God providing a great and powerful political ruler to subdue their enemies and reunify the nation.

Reliving the Christmas story tonight is to relive the mystery of just what God was up to in Bethlehem. God came as an anonymous child of a young, unmarried woman in the poorest, most humble setting with no home nor any societal status. It would appear further that God would have us know little or nothing of the child’s family, his education or upbringing. If this child were to become the “King of Kings” in later life, would not his early history have been written? Would not every detail of such a singularly important person be of interest. We know more about Abraham, Moses and David than we do of Jesus. Why was God content with this?

In my musings I am thinking that maybe God was up to something far less momentous than we credit God with. C.S. Lewis observed that God incarnated His Godself in human form to better communicate with humanity. ² Essentially, all of God’s efforts to speak directly, issue laws, select kings, and inspire prophets seemed ineffective, so God decided to become man. Well, we can see after a couple of thousand years that this amazing effort has not been all that effective either.

I wonder, maybe God incarnated His Godself to get closer to us to better understand us, to learn first hand the human condition of life, its fragility, its pain and suffering as well as its pleasures and joys. Through simple acts of healing God as man could experience the human joy of giving to another and seeing as a human the relief of a disease cured. God chose to experience the riskiest beginning to life and the most painful torture in death, maybe so God would know the worst of life. Perhaps God chose to be an itinerant preacher without sin to learn what happens to a man who would urge, even berate, those whose positions of power would be threatened.

It seems to me as I revisit Christmas, that God came not to judge us, but perhaps simply to be among us to experience all the vagaries of this creation…to get closer to us to better understand how the human experience of birth, life and death influences human behavior, and perhaps also to better enable God to train us to be saints in God’s eternal kingdom. It seems to me that the God who loves me and you would do just that. Thanks be to God.

Merry Christmas!

1. Isaiah 7:14 The Hebrew is clearly translated “young woman”, while the Greek translated the Hebrew as “virgin”. The important part of the verse is the prophesy that God would be with us in a son to be born.
2. Lewis lays out his thinking in his chapter “The Perfect Penitent” in Mere Christianity.