God created the world ex nihilo, out of nothing, meaning that there had been nothing there before, of course, but also that the stuff that the world is made out of is simply nothingness.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made through him, in him was life” – outside of him nothing at all. And so it follows that, when creatures fall out of their relationship with God, in which they were created, they simply tend to go back to the nothingness they came from, nothingness they are made of. “For the wages of sin is death”, as St Paul put it. We can call death our wages or our punishment, but that's just a metaphor, an analogy. Made out of nothing, man is mortal by nature. Life is a mortal disease passed on through procreation, as one of my countrymen put it, a disease passed on from one generation to the next. Having said that, man was created in a state of grace, that is, in friendship with God, constantly contemplating God's face. That made man, naturally bound for death, immortal because sustained by grace, alive for as long as his relationship with God lasted. And it would have lasted forever as far as God was concerned. But then man turned away from God, and we keep turning away, preferring the things of this world, preferring to set ourselves up as gods instead. Cut off from grace, there's nothing else out there able to keep us alive, to keep us from falling back into nothingness.
What was God to do about it? He created man for friendship with himself, should he admit defeat here, concede failure and withdraw, allow for a different outcome to the one originally intended? That would be absurd! The Almighty defeated by sin, by man, outwitted by the devil! But what's the alternative? Simply to override or to overlook man's free choice, pull him back into the state of grace by force? That would be unjust, God would have to act against his very nature, to contradict himself and to violate our nature, too. Another absurdity! That is why, as the Letter to the Hebrews put it, “in these last days God has spoken to us by his Son, through whom also he created the world and who upholds the universe by the word of his power”.
The Incarnation is a drastic solution, to put it mildly, proof of how much God loves us. The wages of sin is death, nothing changes here, “but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord”, St Paul adds immediately. How is this possible? The eternal Word of God in whom everything exists “submitted to our corruption” by taking to himself “a body from a pure and unspotted virgin, a body as a temple in which to be known and dwell”, a body in which he could suffer and die. Because when the Word of God dies on the Cross, the whole of creation dies with him, and the wages of sin are fully paid for everyone, for everything and for ever. The law of death is now abolished. But there is another twist to the story. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” and so he was able to die as one of us. But he never turned away from his Father! His death was therefore uniquely unjust. God could not tolerate this injustice, and death itself couldn't hold on to his Son and our brother, Jesus Christ. And so the grace of the resurrection destroyed death “as straw is destroyed by fire”.
This is roughly how the great St Athanasius explained what we are celebrating today in his famous book entitled On the Incarnation, written in the first half of the 4th century. There is that then, lofty theology, brilliant speculative arguments, persuasive explanations. The beginning of St John's Gospel which we have just heard lends itself very well to them. But then immediately we are confronted with a different reality, light years away from all these abstractions, it would seem. A small child in a manger, crying perhaps, waving his tiny arms, sucking his mother's breast, sleeping a lot. “A wonder is Your mother”, wrote St Ephrem in a poem, addressing the Child: “the Lord entered her and became a servant; he entered as shepherd of all; a lamb he became in her; he emerged bleating.” The eternal Word of God bleating like a goat in his mother's arms. And soon his vision would begin to focus, and he would start recognizing faces, squealing with delight. And then he would start catching things and putting them into his mouth at random, then talking and walking, chasing cats and hens around the house, getting dirty in mud puddles, bringing things home to show to Joseph and Mary, some of them quite disgusting no doubt, like worms, dead mice and lizards' tails. And so on.
If this sounds crazy to you, then I'm sorry but this is what Christianity is all about, this is the crazy religion we are all into! Its genius consists precisely in holding these two realities together, or better: in saying that they are one and the same thing. But above all, it is simply true. It all really happened. And we would cry for joy, if we understood a fraction of what it all means for us.
DSP