Ecce Homo

Christmas Sunday has come and gone, and we in the Christian tradition celebrated and commemorated the Christ child born in Bethlehem. “For unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given” (Isaiah 9:6). This is the greatest mystery the world has ever known. God became flesh. He dwelt among us, walked our sod, ate our food and felt our pain. He laughed when something tickled him; he wept when he was sad and when he had to well, you know, go, he went.

I was thinking through this incredible paradox Sunday when singing Away in a Manager. Starting the second verse, I stopped singing and became quite frustrated with the lyrics of this little lullaby. You know how it goes…

“The cattle are lowing the poor baby wakes, but little Lord Jesus no crying he makes….”

No crying he makes? Seriously? Let’s reset the scene as best we can: Jesus has just passed through the birth canal and into the hands of a teenage mother, his attending nurses are a well qualified cow and two sheep, his bed is a trough where goats are feeding, the smell of the cave would knock over a shepherd and we are to believe the kid isn’t crying?

The anonymous writer of this song has unwittingly captured the philosophy of our age, and we tend to like it. We don’t like to think of Jesus in human terms, maybe because he reminds us to much of ourselves: Needy, cold, scared, helpless and dependent. We’d much rather him pop out of the womb doing miracles, maybe turning the cow’s milk into wine. Or maybe it’s because we’ve bought the lie that says the physical world is evil and the only way to obtain utopia is through the spiritual realm, maybe heaven itself, whatever and wherever that may be. Plato was one of the first to unleash this belief system onto the Western world. Plato emphasized the immortal and immutable soul over the mortal and degenerative body. He believed the soul or psyche was a prisoner inside the body and could only find enlightenment and freedom if removed from the chains of the flesh. In very simple terms, our material world is only a shadow of the ideal, spiritual world beyond and it is not to be trusted.

Early Christian Gnosticism piggy-backed on Plato and claimed that Jesus did not actually have a physical existence. The Gnostics believed the Apostles interacted with the phantom Jesus who merely appeared human. This concept was necessitated by a dualistic worldview, claiming that matter is evil and only light or spirit is good. This early heresy of the church still finds its way into our minds, songs and stories. But why is it so dangerous? For starters, this heresy discounts the death and bodily resurrection of Jesus, it destroys our understanding of Christ being the first fruit of a new creation, and it undermines Jesus’ ability to show us what it really means to be fully human as the perfect “image-bearer” of God.

The human Jesus spent 33 years showing the human race the image of the invisible God. He himself said, “If you know me, you know my Father.” The human Jesus shows us once and for all what God looks like and in so doing, gives us praxis for bearing the image of God. Jesus shows us what it means to be wholly human. The true, complete human being living through the spirit loves his enemies, cares for the weak, welcomes the disenfranchised, forgives the oppressor, feeds the hungry, does not boast, is not proud, sacrifices his wants and needs for others, submits himself to the authorities, brings peace to the war-torn and justice to the perpetrator. A life lived in Jesus’ image is a life transformed by the truth and love of God, incarnately shown to us through the bodily life of the God-man Jesus.

The Jesus of Christmas is also the Jesus of Easter, who rose in bodily form and in so doing, brought His kingdom to earth as it also is in heaven.