The Paradox of Incarnation

At the heart of every aspect of faith lies paradox.

The deeper you go, the more you’re going to be asked to hold things in tension; resisting the tendency to grow weary of the tension and settle for something that is less complex, one-sided, neat and tidy.

Perhaps we’ve been taught that one of the main virtues of faith was to solve the problems, answer the questions, clear up the confusion. And I’m sure there are ways in which that is that case. Sometimes answers are given, sometimes things open up and clarity comes like a gift. But, it seems to me, we must also affirm that the further you go in the life of faith the more you should expect to find things holding hands that you could not otherwise imagine being connected: Jesus’ death AND resurrection, God as Trinity (three-in-one, one-in-three). And for our consideration today: the incarnation, that Jesus is fully human AND fully divine.

Expect to find things holding hands that you could not otherwise imagine being connected. Click To Tweet

In particular when we are talking about the incarnation of Jesus I think the most interesting and important piece of that conversation IS the tension, the paradox. What I mean is, I don’t think the most interesting thing is to look at the humanity of Jesus or (as I think we are more prone to do) look at or lift up the divinity of Jesus (the ways Jesus is NOT like us). It seems to me, our tendency is to scrub clean the humanity of Jesus in such a way that we’re left with a Jesus who is more like Superman than like any one of us.

That being said, I don’t think our problem is solved by simply swinging back the other way and asserting loudly the humanity of Jesus. So I don’t think it will be a productive exercise to open up the gospels and read through them with our highlighters at the ready, marking in yellow the parts where Jesus does divine stuff and marking in green the human stuff Jesus does. As though the point were to parse Jesus out and say, “See he’s both human AND divine. Here’s some human stuff. And over here is some divine stuff.”

But as I said, I think the action, the miracle, the wonder is in the tension. That in Jesus there is a concurrence of the divine and the human. All that is God happens TOGETHER with all that is human in Jesus of Nazareth. So that in the moments where we read something in the gospel where we want to ascribe a particular trait or characteristic to Jesus’ humanity OR divinity, the task is to think those things TOGETHER.

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This is an invitation to non-dual thinking. An invitation, I believe, that comes to each of us sooner or later. And it is an invitation that we must accept if we want to keep growing, learning, changing.

It happens when we are met in the middle of our ordinary life by something that simply does not fit within the constructs we’ve built or been given to make sense of things. And a careful reading of the gospels will, I suggest, identify Jesus as being someone a lot like that: someone who simply does not fit into our preconceived categories.

In fact, the early church labored to have us read the gospels in a non-dual way and to understand what God was up to in Jesus through this mystery of the incarnation, where humanity and divinity happen together. So that the church’s first attempts at atonement theories (how we are reconciled to God, made at one with God) did not originate with formulaic notions of what happened on the cross (that came later), but in naming the unexpected, unimagined move of God to enter totally into our experience of being human. God Almighty crosses all the boundaries we had worked so hard to put in place saying, “This here is human, that over there is divine,” and in Jesus, God becomes all that we are without ceasing to be all that God is!

In Jesus, God becomes all that we are without ceasing to be all that God is! Click To Tweet

And that, right there, is a pretty good definition of what the church would have to offer in the first few centuries to describe what God was up to in Jesus and how that was “for us and for our salvation.”

For example, St. Athanasius, who lived in the 4th century, said of Jesus, “He became what we are so that we might become what he is.” And, Anthanasius’ contemporary, St. Gregory of Nazianzus in like fashion said, “For that which (Jesus) has not assumed (Jesus) has not healed.”

You see, it’s in the paradox. It’s in the tension. It’s as God takes on, enters into, assumes humanity that a new possibility is opened up for us. Salvation springs up for humanity as a result of this concurrence, this happening together in Jesus. No more is there separation or divide, because God, in Jesus, has moved toward us and taken us into God’s self. And that is marvel and miracle and mystery enough!

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But I actually think there’s more. I think it goes even further. What is unique, particular, and begins in Jesus — that there divinity and humanity happen together — I think is meant to be true universally, for all of humanity, for you and me. And St. Athanasius says as much if we but have ears to hear him: “He became what we are so that we might become what he is.”

Did you hear it?

“… that we might become what he is.”  

That the union, the concurrence, the happening together wasn’t just to deal with a problem, but was meant to (re)create our entire way of being human. That our humanity was meant to happen together with divinity.

And, in fact, the church has talked about this since day one, not casually, but with some sense of the scandal and miracle and heaviness of what she was pronouncing. And she has used words like holiness, sanctification, theosis, deification. Trying to find as many ways as she can to make clear that we are meant to become what He is: the human happening together with the divine.

How’s that for tension and paradox!