Looking back, I'm often surprised by how long it took for me to believe in Jesus and the God of Christianity. God has changed me so much in the last year and a half that my 26 years as a non-Christian almost feel like they were part of another life. But as recently as 2011, I could have listed about a dozen misgivings and doubts that prevented me from letting Christ into my life. Morally, theologically, and practically, Christianity made very little sense to me. The concepts of the incarnation and the divinity of Jesus were right up there among the stumbling blocks.
I'm far from being the only person for whom these were major obstacles to belief. In the centuries since Jesus walked the earth, the idea that the deity that created the whole universe became a human being was either nonsense or blasphemy for many people. (This remains the case to this day.) The beatings and painful death he suffered in Jerusalem were hardly selling points for Christianity, either. The fact that his apostles continued to proclaim his victory and kingship over the whole world after his death seemed like complete foolishness to Jew and Gentile alike.
Yet God's purposes in sending His Son to live among us weren't thwarted by Jesus' death and resurrection, but were fulfilled by his obedience to the Father. Not as a spirit, but as a man. Like the rest of us, he got hungry and thirsty and dirty. He worked with his hands for a living before his public ministry, probably as a carpenter or stonemason. The last thing he seemed like was the long-awaited King of Israel. But there were signs from the very beginning of his life that Jesus was the Lord and Savior that the prophets had predicted, and for whom the oppressed people of Israel had eagerly waited and prayed for. At the same time, God gave humanity the Savior they needed rather than the one they wanted. He was to be a man of peace rather than war, preaching a Kingdom of God whose real enemy wasn't the Roman Empire that ruled politically over the Jews, but the forces of sin and death that ruled in the hearts of all people. He was to be a man of compassion rather than wrath, of humility rather than arrogance.
Thus, the wise men and shepherds come to kneel before him as King not in a palace, but in a lowly, dirty manger. His childhood is spent not in a nobleman's house in the lap of luxury, but in a household sustained by hard work and modest living. In these things, and in his refusal to play by the rules of human behavior set by millennia of violence, oppression, and grabs for worldly power, Jesus proved himself to be stronger than any man who had ever lived.
From beginning to end, Jesus challenged his contemporaries to radically change their definition of what it meant to truly be a human being made in God's image. More than that, through his actions, teachings, and self-sacrifice, he urged them to drastically re-center their ideas about God around him. Around a man born in a manger, a man who worked hard with his hands, a man who refused to hate or preach violence against the Romans. Around pure, divine love, the only thing really able to defeat the forces of sin and death that had marred mankind's ability to be God's children.
This month, we celebrate the physical birth of our Lord and Savior in Bethlehem. Not as a fully-formed adult or a disembodied spirit, but as a human baby. More often than not, our proclamations of Jesus' immaculate conception and divinity will be greeted with confusion, disbelief, or charges of blasphemy. People reacted the same to the apostles when they preached these aspects of the Gospel as they do now. But against all the shouts of the world that the idea of God becoming man is ridiculous, that it is below God to be physical or to live like a normal man, we hold up the love of the God who refused to give up on us. Who, knowing our frailty and weakness against temptation, came Himself to save His people and fulfill His plans for creation. Jesus, "who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; but made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness." (Philippians 2:6-7)
It could only be the Son, no one else. As much as this may seem foolish or like a stumbling block to faith in God, this fact is the center of our lives in Him. We are children of God, redeemed through His own actions. Saved by a man who was born, who walked and worked, ate and drank, and who suffered on a cross for his fellow human beings. For us. Behind all the family gatherings and presents and food, this Christmas season is about a God who loved us enough to live amongst us. And knowing this in our hearts is worth more than all the gifts in the world.
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