incarnational

I've always hated that word. Perhaps because I never fully understood it. It always sounded overly theological. Not until this year have I begun to process its implications towards living it out as a church.

Christ models that it is possible to be both God and human at the same time. How, I still get confused. That's a pretty terrifying thought to be honest. It seems to me that throughout history the church has retreated into deifying Jesus so thoroughly that the human Christ often times can't be seen. To this otherworldly, superspiritual Jesus I simply have to offer myself; my worship, my devotion. By the ordinary, human peasant Christ I am challenged that maybe it's possible to be both human and Godlike. I've been reading in Matthew, and the scene is after Jesus began teaching in the synagogue and returned to his home town and got this response:

"Where did this man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers? Isn't this the carpenter's son? Isn't his mother's name Mary, and aren't his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas?" (Matt 13)

Here's my distress: How the heck could Christ be the Messiah, the human incarnation of God, the second person of the Trinity for thirty years and no one at home noticed? How does that happen? Nobody in Nazareth smiled with a wink and said, "I always thought there was something special or unique about that kid." Instead they wonder how he got all that power and ability. Somehow Jesus could be fully God and blend into Galilean soceity-hardly the most poious or sophisticated culture-without creating some type of effect. This perspective on the incarnation bothers me because it dangerously invites me to follow Christ in all his ordinariness as well as his godliness. The incarnation demands that we neither retreat into our own little Christian worlds nor offer ourselves freely to the values of secular culture. It's safe to say that's the most dangerous place to be. (On the other side of emphasizing the deification, gnostic gospels are becoming popularized, particularly in the US where Christian history is being rewritten because it is claimed that it was the creators of the early church after Christ that made Him into the saviour....i.e. the other gospels such as the most recent Judas Gospel. There is the danger to claim that he was never beyond human status)


Interestingly, the story could be seen as almost completely undermining the divinity of Jesus. It is included because it is a dangerous memory for followers of Christ. We are called, like Christ, to be godly, but we are expected to live it out fully in the midst of others. There is no more dangerous yet exciting path than the one trodden by Jesus. There is no better setting to be incarnational than church planting where you have no where to "retreat".

Eikon is and will continue to be incarnational. me like that word.