God Enfleshed

The incarnation inspires wonder and delight in knowing and worshipping God, who is beyond all we know and understand and yet is as fully present to us in the person of Jesus as we are one to another.

I invite you to consider the wonder and delight Jairus experienced when Jesus healed his daughter in Mark 5. Jairus had heard about Jesus” ministry, gone in search of him, and led him to his home. Their journey was interrupted by a lonely, elderly woman who was healed of an ailment when she touched Jesus” cloak. Jairus”s daughter died while they were on their way. Jesus asked Jairus to continue with him in hope and faith. And at the words, “talitha cumi“ (“Little girl, I say to you, get up!”), his daughter was restored to life.

What happened in this miraculous moment among Jairus, his daughter, the ailing woman, and Jesus? What power overcame their illnesses? Whose voice said, “Little girl, I say to you, get up!” In whom did the ailing woman and Jairus entrust their faith?

The power was God”s, whose character exudes love for us in our most vulnerable human frailty. The voice was that of Jesus, a human person with human skin and bone, human heart and hands, human touch and tenor. And the faith of Jairus and the ailing woman demonstrated confidence in the presence of God reaching into and touching their lives in the ministry of Jesus.

The miraculous moment was the wonder and delight of the incarnation: God enfleshed. “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him” (Colossians 1:19).

God Enfleshed

We lose sight of the wonder and delight of the incarnation whenever we separate the words God and enfleshed when speaking about Jesus. Referring to Jesus as God without using the word enfleshed means we might picture Jairus”s daughter waking from death to see God standing before her. Yet we know the creator God does not have a physical form, body, or gender. Jairus”s daughter did not see God when she saw Jesus, but God enfleshed.

If we think of Jesus as only God and not God enfleshed, the ministry of Jesus is also sorely misunderstood. Jesus in this story and throughout the Gospels calls upon God and God”s power””not his own””to heal. Like Jairus”s daughter, Jesus is raised from the dead not by his own power, but by the power of God. “God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death” (Acts 2:24).

While the incarnation cautions against a simplistic equating of God with Jesus, it also commends our confidence in the full presence of God embodied in Jesus. If Jesus was human flesh, human person, human nature, enfleshed but not God enfleshed, the ministry of Jesus is again misunderstood. At worst, this idea suggests Jesus had no power to heal beyond ordinary human means and that the Gospel stories are mistaken about his capacity to perform miracles and speak God”s word. At best, it makes Jesus nothing more than a fleshly conduit or human instrument through which God acted””someone with godly powers but not the presence of God itself.

Yet the wonderful, awe-inspiring reality is that the ailing woman, Jairus, and his daughter encountered not only the man, Jesus, but God enfleshed. The one who healed the woman and raised the daughter was both human and God: God enfleshed. When thinking about Jesus, both words belong inseparably together. “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:19).

The Nature of God”s Love

The classic theological way of speaking about Jesus as one person (distinct from but equal to God) with two natures (in every sense fully human, and in every sense fully God) was part of a complex process of discernment during the first five centuries of the early church. While the debates appeared centered on Jesus, the heart of the dispute concerned the nature of God and the character of God”s love. Many early Christians, like many contemporary Christians, had difficulty believing and professing that the God of all creation would willingly become bound completely to the human condition and subject to a human body, frailty, temptation, even death on a cross.

In the end, theologians such as Arius (fourth century) were censured for believing it was impossible for the eternal creator God to be truly enfleshed within the limitations of a fully human existence. Arius taught that Jesus was a uniquely singular “superman” rather than a human person like you or me. But in fact, “we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are””yet he did not sin” (Hebrews 4:15).

In question was whether God”s love could come as close to us as we are to one another, whether this love could have human body and soul, and reach fully into flesh-and-blood existence. The Christian testimony since the early church has been a resounding, Yes! The Jewish confidence in the saving love of God mediated through patriarchs and their clans, kings and queens, prophets and prophetesses, even the poor and exiled, became the Christian confidence that God”s love had taken a new form and reached a new apex in Jesus.

God”s love was not mediated in Jesus, but personified completely, in words, deeds, and life. In the incarnation, God embraced the physicality of human experience and entered history unveiled, born of a woman, God enfleshed in Jesus. For Christians, knowing and delighting in God is experiencing God”s unfathomable love for us up close and in the flesh, Emmanuel, God with us. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory” (John 1:14).

The Shape of Salvation

The incarnation is also tightly bound to how we understand the shape of Christian salvation. This realization was the linchpin of early Christian debates about the presence of God in Jesus. Fourth-century theologian Gregory of Nazianzus summed it up well in what became a guiding principle of Christian theology: “What is not assumed is not redeemed.” Whatever parts of human existence were taken up and embraced (or “assumed”) by Jesus, are those parts of our own existence that experience God”s salvation (“redeemed”). If the creaturely nature assumed by Jesus was limited in any way, then our salvation is limited accordingly.

Here is why the formula is so important. Consider how often we assume that at death our souls escape our bodies and float up to Heaven to live eternally. Many people in our society, and even some Christians, imagine salvation is primarily concerned with the destiny of our souls and has very little to do with human physicality, either now or after death. Yet that is not the paradigm established for us in Jesus. God raised the full physical person of Jesus from the dead and not simply his soul; otherwise, his body would have remained in the grave.

This means Christian salvation is not directed toward the soul of person, but envelops and transforms the whole of our person in totality””heart, mind, soul, and body. God saves it all, because in Jesus, God became entirely all of what we are. We see the full shape and scope of Christian salvation only because the incarnation affirms the full presence of God in the full humanity of Jesus. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Incarnation means in our daily Christian life there is nothing outside the scope of God”s saving love and grace for us in Jesus: no sin, no temptation, no failure, no arrogance, no cowardice, no illness, no disease, no disfigurement, no physical limitation, and no addiction, however small or great. The salvation of our whole person is the aim of God”s salvation for us, and because of the incarnation, this salvation reaches us now in every aspect of our lives, even while we wait to experience God eternally. Knowing and experiencing that all of who we are is destined to be with all of who God is for all time, is the wonder and delight of the incarnation.

The Spirit of Christian Ministry

Finally, the incarnation calls us to a spirit of ministry that is distinctly Christian in two ways. First, the incarnation means we cannot limit where we are willing to take the love of God. Second, we cannot limit with whom we are willing to share the love of God.

The incarnation, as we have seen, is the radical affirmation that God through Jesus embraced every aspect of human life as an act of love toward all of creation””not only the experiences of love and joy, friendship and fellowship, but also abandonment and betrayal, violence and brutality. The reach of God”s presence through Jesus into all of human life means there is no context in which we are justified in limiting the expanse of God”s love.

The incarnation conveys the spirit and nature of Christian ministry as unbounded, risky, involved, and messy. Wherever God has been willing to be present in Jesus, we too must be willing to be the presence of God as the body of Christ. The incarnation, God enfleshed, continues in the church in our ministry to one another and the world. “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18).

The incarnation is also the reason Christians are called to share God”s love with all people and to recognize all people as beloved creatures of God. In Colossians, Paul writes that Jesus participated in the creation of all things and is the full image, or “icon,” of God. When God chose to come closest to us, God did so in human form. The incarnation is our assurance that sin has not, and cannot, destroy the mark of God”s image on all created things.

This means we are called to honor the image of God (in Latin, imago Dei) in all people and extend the love of God without limit or qualification, regardless of race, color, sexuality, nationality, ability, and even character. Our wonder and delight in God is expressed in the spirit of Christian ministry to all, because “the Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth” (Colossians 1:15, 16).

Meeting God Enfleshed in Jesus

The incarnation beautifully pictures the expansive nature of God”s character and his intimate love for creation: Jairus, his daughter, and the ailing woman experienced this love firsthand in the flesh and blood person of Jesus.

The incarnation beautifully pictures the shape of Christian salvation: the woman and daughter experienced physical and whole-person salvation when they were restored to life.

And the incarnation beautifully pictures the spirit of Christian ministry that extends to all places and all people. Neither the wealthy synagogue ruler Jairus, nor his unnamed daughter, nor even the woman deemed unclean was outside the reach of Jesus” love, attention, and ministry.

Our delight and wonder in knowing God””like theirs””is captured in the miracle and mystery of the incarnation, meeting God enfleshed in Jesus.

Miriam Perkins serves as associate professor of theology and society at Emmanuel Christian Seminary in Johnson City, Tennessee.