Paul Graves: Accepting Jesus’ humanity as reality

It’s time to take a few minutes of deeper breathing from the crush and rush of Christmas commercials and the garish mix of religious and cultural Christmas symbols.

Jesus is more than the clichéd “reason for the season.” Jesus is the Incarnation of God, God in the flesh.

But what if there is much more that the Incarnation means than we usually settle for?

What if God’s Incarnation actually began not as flesh but as the natural world? What if Adam was the symbolic incarnation also? What if my questions are meant not to simply tweak the nose of religious tradition but to stretch our wonderings about God in the flesh?

John’s Gospel enters the Christmas story only in one verse, 1:14. The Message translates that verse:

“The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighbor-hood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, generous inside and out, true from start to finish.”

In this context, glory is used to identify the evidence of God rather than the praise we so often associate with the word. That evidence was the presence of Jesus as a human. Not a divine façade of a human, but a human in every active, vulnerable sense of that word.

Why do we shy away from that much humanity in Jesus? My bias here? When we pretend Jesus is only pretending to be human, we dismiss God’s fuller intention that being human is so much more than we settle for.

We dismiss God’s willingness to not just identify with us, but literally become human in the full spectrum of our capabilities and limitations. We’re not comfortable with God being so vulnerable. We’re not comfortable with God settling for what we call free will.

We are trained to not be comfortable with the depth of our own humanity, so we often settle for wordplay when honoring God’s becoming a human we call Jesus. For instance, when we say capital-W Word, we too often really mean “words.”

Too often, we’re trained to think of “Word of God” as a phrase that really refers to the “words of the Bible.” Too often, we allow the words of the Bible – “Hear the Word of God” – to get in the way of experiencing the Word of God. Consider this helpful and valid description of the Word of God: “God’s faithful action.”

As you read John 1: 1-14, substitute “God’s faithful action” for “Word of God.” The words of the Bible may refer to God’s faithful action, but they are not the actual Word of God.

To those readers who think I’m bordering on heresy here, please stop hyperventilating long enough to consider this: No words of our invention can really plumb the depths of what God’s faithful action in and through being human is all about.

I take the Word of God, God’s faithful action, too seriously through the life of Jesus to take the words of the Bible literally. There is simply so much more meaning in the Word as lived out in Jesus – and, frankly, in us also – than can be contained in the words we read.

Wonder with me about this: Why would God choose to become one of us, a human being, if all we are is a collection of sinners? The essence of being human is “generous inside and out, true from start to finish.” I do like that description of incarnation from The Message.

God became Jesus to show us who we as human beings are – and can become!