Jay’s Blog – Becoming Flesh
Returning from Thanksgiving holidays usually means that Advent is upon us. Advent is the time of the year we prepare to celebrate the Incarnation of Jesus, that moment in history when the second person of the Godhead took on human flesh and dwelled among us, or as poet John Betjeman says,
The Maker of the stars and sea
Became a Child on earth for me.
Over the past week, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of Christ taking on flesh, what it means to live embodied lives as human beings made in the image of God, and the impact of sin and Christ’s redemption on our identity as material and immaterial beings. My father passed away last week after a four-year-long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease and the return of his cancer, which is what ultimately took his life.
While my father no longer lives among us in human form, I know he still lives. He exists; I believe he has conscience and memories (fully restored now, whereas they had been hampered and trapped inside a formerly-decaying and diseased physical brain). I believe he is fully aware and cognizant of his surroundings. He is with God in a way he wasn’t early last week, as he was gasping for his last earthly breaths (It’s incredible the way our former bodies fight to stay alive, isn’t it? It makes you wonder why, when those last days are so very terrible). He is in a state that’s more intimate with God and freer than he’s ever been.
While I grieve his loss deeply, he’s no longer in pain. He doesn’t yearn to return here. He now remembers who we are again, and I believe he longs for us to be there with him, but he doesn’t miss us. He’s no longer bound by time and space, now existing in a different dimension, and all his needs for companionship and community are met by God and those he’s now with.
My dad is not currently a physical being at this moment; he is spirit only. And, in this sense, he’s not wholly what he will one day be, nor is what we currently conceive as “Heaven,” where he is now, where he will always be. We know these things because the resurrection of Jesus and the last two chapters of Revelation show them to us. The Incarnation, God being made flesh, becoming a man, is critical to understanding completely how we were made in God’s image and our ultimate destiny, all of which involves being embodied, material, fleshly beings.
Genesis 3 tells us we were created in God’s image. God the Father is a spirit being only, John 4:24 tells us, having no material body or form. And yet, as God’s creation, we’re given both a spirit, like God, and a body, unlike God’s being at the time of creation.
Before the first Christmas, in the days of the Old Testament, God appeared to people at times in human form. We call these “theophanies,” and each time they occur, they are believed to be preincarnate appearances of Christ, the second member of the Godhead. He takes on human form on multiple occasions in order to interact with people. He is the “angel of the Lord” who appears to Abraham in Genesis 18 and swears by himself He has feet that need washing by Abraham. He appears with three other angels, but only one is described as “the Lord.”
Christ appears to Jacob in a vision in Genesis 28:12 of a great ladder ascending into Heaven, on which angels are climbing up and down, and at the top of which is the Lord, identifying himself as “The God of Abraham, your Father, and the God of Isaac.” He reaffirms God’s promises to Abraham. He is probably the one who walked with Adam in the cool of the morning in Genesis and who Moses saw from the rock in Exodus. Every time the Old Testament records men interacting with God in human form, it is the second member of the Trinity.
Yet, while God the Son takes on human form in the past, something different happens at the Incarnation. For the first time in history, God actually becomes human flesh, joined with man, combining the essence of God with human DNA through Mary to become fully God and fully man. This is something God never was before in the time/space continuum—indeed, God, for the first time, submits to time and space, becoming a creature who ages and decays and exists in a specific time and place and nowhere else for the duration of his life on earth. He becomes the man, Jesus, but remains God. This is called the hypostatic union, and it’s an incredible mystery that makes my head hurt to think about.
Jesus becomes flesh so that he can restore our identity through his actual, DNA-infused blood. One of the numerous catastrophic outcomes of our sin was the destruction of our identity and the ruin of our humanity. While our spiritual selves lived on, our physical, material selves decayed, died, and were destroyed. We became less than what we were before. What’s more, our spiritual selves died as well, separated from God forever into suffering and death.
This is why death is so terrible. It’s abnormal and unnatural, because we were created and intended to always be connected to our bodies, to grow stronger and stronger, not weaker. We weren’t intended to be disembodied. Death literally tore us apart.
Death and decay feel wrong because they are very, very wrong. In four to five years, I watched my dad retreat into dementia from Alzheimer’s like he was walking into a dark tunnel, and I could no longer see or talk to him, and there was nothing either of us could do about it.
There was a time before he forgot me when I took him to lunch. He looked at me across the table, and I could see love in his eyes. “Jay, I just… “I just,” he haltingly spoke, his intact, entrapped spirit trying to articulate the depth of his affection for me, how proud he was, and the painful awareness that it was all slipping away from him—indeed, it had already slipped away, robbing him of his ability to express what I could see in his eyes and what I knew he was feeling, as well as the words he desperately wanted to share with me before he was gone.
“I know, Dad. I know.”
That was the last heartfelt, coherent conversation I had with my father, and it captures perfectly the cruelty of the brokenness of decay and death. All of my school family members who have lost someone feel that it wasn’t supposed to be this way. This isn’t some cosmic fluctuation, some accidental rift in the collocation of atoms that make up the universe. This was intentional. We broke this. We let loose this demon from hell, and we could not fix it.
We needed God to fix it. And that’s why Jesus became a man.
Hebrews 2:14 tells us that Jesus destroyed the power of death by dying for us, taking away the penalty of sin and making it possible for our bodies and spirits to be restored to each other. Tim Keller says, “Jesus is our great captain and champion; he has killed death.”
Christ has won the victory and defeated death, making it possible for the Apostle Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15:5, to even mock death: “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” Paul is not taunting death here because it’s no longer painful. It is; often excruciatingly so. In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis noted that when someone dies, not only do they die, but the part of your identity defined by how you related to that person dies as well. In that sense, a part of you dies with each person with whom you are close that passes on. The closer you are to that person, the more of you dies. And, that’s painful.
What Paul is taunting is death, and Satan, as the author of that death, no longer gets the last word. He no longer gets to claim victory. When a honeybee stings you, it’s terribly painful, yet as it leaves its barbed stinger in you and flies off, it ruptures its lower abdomen. As it flies off, it essentially initiates the process of bleeding to death. This is what Christ has done, and why Paul rejoices. Death still hurts, but in Jesus it won’t ultimately kill you, and though Satan and death may strike a blow, it kills them instead of you.
What’s even better is that you get your body back. But, not just any body, not the dying, decaying body you left behind. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul talks about this new body: “So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.” Like Jesus when raised from the dead, whom the disciples recognized yet who looked different, you’ll have a new body, a better body, united with your spirit. Once again, the way it was always intended to be. A body that gets better and better, not decaying, but regenerating. And, in that newly-restored body we will live, and work, and play and be together forever here in a newly-restored Jerusalem on a newly-restored earth where you will be an embodied son or daughter of the Living God. (Rev. 21 and 22).
My dad will be present in his transformed body, along with all the people you have ever lost and will lose in the future, as long as they know and love Jesus. This isn’t some beautiful pipe dream; it’s as real and true as anything else in Scripture. This is the promise of Christmas, and the Incarnation—the “becoming flesh” of Jesus—is the down payment on that promise.
Jay Ferguson, Ph.D., Head of School at Grace Community School, writes regularly on his blog, JaysBlog.org.