Incarnation
Wednesday, Nov. 27
Mark 2:18 – Chapter 3 Click here to read
In last Sunday’s sermon I spoke of four words you’re likely to hear again over the next several weeks of preaching: apostles, prophets, teachers and evangelists. Each of those have a role in making disciples for Jesus Christ and also does something else: each puts a human face on the message of salvation.
For that, I’d like to look at another word we hear in church but may not think much about: incarnation.
If this sounds like the eastern teaching of reincarnation, there’s a reason. It’s a completely different idea religiously, but a similar definition. Incarnation is a non-human thing experienced in human form.
So, for religions that teach reincarnation, a soul has multiple incarnations: the human form of the non-human soul.
In Christian theology, Jesus is the incarnation of God: the human form of a non-human God (though the relationship isn’t quite the same as in reincarnation).
We also can speak of a person being the incarnation of a trait: the incarnation of integrity or the incarnation of evil, for example. Again, it is a human experience of a non-human idea.
Advent is all about incarnation, as it is the expectation that God, who is more than human, will come in a way that we experience him in human form. Jesus was the incarnation of God. In Advent, we also look forward to his return when we can again experience him face to face.
This might sound like theological wordplay with little connection to the day’s reading, but in fact the concept of incarnation runs through several of the seemingly unrelated stories and sayings that we read today.
In the question about fasting, Jesus says that the expected Messiah has been made flesh in him. Fasting is for the time of anticipation; now it’s time to celebrate.
The challenging saying about putting new wine into old wine skins is about the need for a completely new way of thinking: the old understanding of who and what the Messiah is simply cannot explain the reality.
The explanation about Sabbath being made for people, not people for the Sabbath, tells us to understand God’s law in terms of people, not words on a page. The written law failed to bring salvation, so now God has sent his law in human form so that we can see what it looks like in action.
The sending out of the 12 disciples is an affirmation that the gospel is spread person-to-person. Notice that he connects preaching with driving out demons; people hear the gospel when they understand it is what frees them from their own bondage.
And even the account of Jesus’s mother and brothers redefines family relationship. We are the brothers and sisters, the parents and children, of those who are sons and daughters of God. It is God present in us that makes us who and what we are.