Christmas: The God Who Comes (3)

The Third Birth Story

This last post on the season of Christmas takes us to the third of Jesus’ birth stories in the New Testament. Yes, that’s right – a third birth story. And it comes at the heart of the last book in the Bible – the book of Revelation. In Rev.12 we hear a tale of a fantastic woman giving birth to a son even as a mighty dragon waits eagerly to devour the child when he arrives. The child is snatched away, however, before the dragon can execute his dastardly plan. Enraged the dragon does battle with archangel Michael who defeats him and banishes him and the angels who support him from heaven to earth.

Not your Matthew and Luke kind of story, is it? Not one for the Hallmark Christmas cards. This tale of cosmic warfare is John the Seer’s retelling of Jesus’ story in its largest horizon. Here the story is not set among the Abraham trajectory as Matthew’s is, nor the Adam trajectory as Luke’s is. In this birth story it is cosmic warfare against the devil and his minions that is the setting. This is John’s way of underlining the utter and supreme importance of Jesus. In Revelation what happens in heaven is decisive and determinative for what happens on earth. The child’s escape of the dragon and his subsequent defeat in the war in heaven assures readers that however grim things may seem on earth for the church at any particular time, the truth is they are on the winning side and able to act effectively against the enemy.

However we read Matthew’s and Luke’s birth stories, then, they must be read with this larger horizon for Jesus’ intentions, identity, and vocation in mind. C. S. Lewis does this wonderfully in Mere Christianity: “Enemy-occupied territory---that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”

-Christian faith is a call to enlist on the side of this struggle we ought always to have been on and are graciously extended a further opportunity by God.

-Christmas is the moment the decisive attack begins as earth’s rightful ruler begins the decisive campaign to reclaim that rule from the rebels, human and supra-human, and exercise that rule on earth.

-And Christmas means for Jesus’ followers, his troops, participation in his “great campaign of sabotage” to undermine the reign of sin and establish a way of life that demonstrates God’s true intent for life on this planet. Revelation uses the cosmic battle birth story  to underwrite the assurance and faithfulness of his followers on earth whom the dragon is persecuting even though his cause is lost and his time is short (Rev.12:12).

The Cosmic Dimension of Jesus Christ

This story also places our efforts to think about Jesus Christ in their largest and ultimately most significant context. It asks us whether our Jesus is big enough. Our thinking about him must never lose sight of this cosmic dimension of who Jesus is. This is the mystery of his being that a truly and fully human being is also “always and at the same time” fully and truly God in that human flesh. The one whose appearance and life here catalyzed that war in heaven that assures us of victory and strengthens us for journey of following him now.

How we understand Jesus will determine how we understand the scope and significance of his work for us. For the first 1000 years of church history the dominant way of seeing Jesus was as Christus Victor, “Christ the Victor.” Victor over the cosmic powers which opposed God and his purposes, sin, death, and (d)evil. Later on the emphasis shifted Jesus as the one who forgives our sins (the plural is significant) and assures us of life with God in heaven after death and through eternity. The cosmic dimension slips far into the background and has only been recovered in recent times. We’ll look at this in more detail when we get to the season of Easter.

Matthew and Luke’s birth stories imply this larger story but since in our day this larger story is often missed or wrongly articulated it is good to lift up this cosmic birth story with its larger horizon.

Creation and New Creation

The cosmic perspective in Revelation also shows us that God will redeem the creation itself from the futility into which it has fallen as a result of sin. Rev.21-22 picture the new creation, a new heaven and a new earth, God has purged, renewed, and brought to full flourishing.

God will not abandon the work of his hands no matter how badly we have defaced it. He did not create as a disposable accessory to be tossed away because it is no longer bright and shiny. God will not only redeem his creation but will hold humanity accountable for how we have (not) cared for it. This is our home, our eternal home. We will live here with God in fellowship and love throughout eternity.

Christ and Human Nature

Christ assumed human nature, flesh such as ours. That flesh is the fallen human flesh we bear. If he took on a pristine, pure, unspoiled human flesh, he could not forgive or save us. The early church formulated its understanding like this: “What is not assumed, is not healed.” This statement of Gregory of Nazianzen (4^th century a. d.)  began as a response to Jesus had a rational mind (post 2 in this series). It claims that for

Jesus to heal our sinful minds he had to have a human mind like ours, a fallen mind. When this insight is generalized it includes all aspects of our humanity, to every aspect of our nature, especially to those things which make us weak, frail, and fallible. All creation is intended to end up under Christ (Eph.1:10) and thus every aspect of it must be cleansed and redeemed.

The idea of the virginal conception (not birth, Jesus was born in way all humans are born) of Jesus gets at this idea. Truly born into humanity as a real person (through Mary), Jesus also bears the divine nature through his conception by the Spirit and not a human father. What ever we might make of this story (and I see no unsurpassable objections to it myself), this is part of the truth we ought to take from it.

Everyday and in every way Jesus works to redeem human nature by his every act of obedience and loyalty to his Father. Step by step, attitude by attitude, day by day Jesus unbent in his life the kinks, twists, and distortions ours by virtue of the fall into sin.  Baxter Kruger explains,

“As Athanasius said, the human race was on the road to ruin and lapsing into nonbeing. In its deepest sense, the incarnation addresses this threat of our ultimate disappearance from existence.  In becoming flesh, the Son of God establishes his existing divine relationship or union with humanity, which was seriously jeopardized by Adam’s rejection, inside the very specific context of human alienation and rebellion.  In an act of astonishing redemptive genius, the Son of God entered personally into the reality that threatened his union with us, namely, our rejection of him.  By giving himself into the hands of wicked men he yielded to our great darkness and rebellion, suffering them personally, thereby using our alien vision and rebellion as the means of establishing his union with us in our sin.  Bearing the insidious scorn of broken humanity, Jesus met us and accepted us precisely in our resistance and unwillingness to come to him, indeed in our hatred of him and of his exposing light.  Therein the incarnate, crucified and resurrected Son secured his union with us by way of our unbelief, once and for all obliterating the threat of our nonexistence.  For he is a merciful Creator who loves the human race” (https://www.perichoresis.org/a-note-on-union-with-christ/https://www.perichoresis.org/a-note-on-union-with-christ/).

From the smallest and most intimate aspects of our lives to the redemption of the cosmos to the defeat of the dragon the child born to Mary effects all this. That’s what we celebrate at Christmas. Not a cute, cuddly baby boy but a warrior born to do battle and set all things right. If we do not know this we do not rightly celebrate Christmas!