Advent 3: Tuesday

The strange good news of our faith is that incarnation (God-in-the-flesh) is about weakness rather than strength:

God comes into the world as a baby. Naked and needy. That’s the way the Christian story goes. That’s a significant revelation. And it’s maybe not all that comfortable for us. God doesn’t come to the world looking big and self-sufficient and simple and coherent, like an answer or a moral absolute, but looking weak and hungry, totally dependent on his mother. That’s what babies are like. They can’t propel themselves. They can’t even focus their eyes. Helpless is not a bad word for what a baby is. God comes into the world as a baby. That is a subversion of how we might expect the almighty God to come.

This hasn’t always immediately struck everyone as good news. Ever since people heard this story, there’s been a tendency to think it might be better to have a God that never really shared the weakness of the flesh. A God that never really shared our weakness, our blood, our bones, our need. But whenever that tendency surfaced, the community looked back over everything and said, you can’t get away from it. The Christian story is a story about God become human: fully human, fully God. You may choose another story, but then it’s not this one.

-Debbie Blue, From Stone to Living Word: Letting the Bible Live Again (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2008), pp. 121-122.