The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
John 1:14
Living every day in a human body, we tend to take the wonder of it for granted. Something like 14% of your body mass is your skeleton, the hard parts which give our bodies structure and cause us to look and move like humans. The other 86% of you is squishy stuff – muscle, fat, organs and blood vessels all held together by connective tissues and wrapped up in a layer of epithelium to keep your body’s water from sloshing out. Each cell is a microcosm of the whole, a little bag of jelly held together by a phospholipid bilayer studded with proteins that control what comes in and out.
When John writes that ‘the Word became flesh’, it’s this squishy stuff that he’s picturing. He could have written ‘the Word became meat’. John chooses to frame the incarnation in the most visceral terms, not merely as God taking on a human mind, or human form in the abstract – but as God becoming a bag of human-flavoured jelly.
In the world where John was writing, a new philosophy known as Gnosticism was gaining popularity, claiming that matter itself was evil. In Gnostic thought, the spiritual was ‘good’, deriving from a supreme deity, but the material world had been created by a malevolent lesser divinity and as such was tainted.
While few would call themselves Gnostics today, suspicion that the material world is somehow dirty or inferior is a theme that has never quite gone away through the history of the church. Have you ever heard it implied in church that we should feel a bit guilty about enjoying our Christmas dinner and presents rather than spending the whole day in silent prayer? Or has anyone ever hinted to you that to have a Christian job doing ‘spiritual work’ would be a better use of your gifts than working in the ‘secular world’ of science?
The incarnation as reported in John 1 blows that idea to pieces. The second person of the eternal Trinity is content to put on flesh and dwell among us, not merely appearing as human but fully inhabiting our material world down to the tiniest molecule and cell in Jesus’ body. The one who designed each organ and tissue, who structured our bodies with incredible care such that these squishy bags of flesh can walk and talk and think and love, now shares our anatomy.
What hope that brings for us as embodied beings. Much as we might operate in the online world day by day, our humanity is not independent of our bodies. I am not made to exist as a soul on its own. If physical death is the end of the line for my body, there’s not much hope for me.
But Jesus, coming ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh’ (Romans 8:3), not only ‘condemned sin in the flesh’ but bought eternal life for us fleshy humans. Jesus died in a human body, and was raised in a human body. The Son of God now permanently inhabits a perfected human body, and one day we will too. Our organs, muscles, ligaments, blood vessels – all will be transformed and restored in new creation biology.
For those of us who spend our working days studying the make-up of the material world, this is good news indeed. God is not indifferent to physics, chemistry and biology. He is not only interested in the spiritual. In reality, God is so invested in his physical creation that he would come and live as part of it.
As we read and sing about the Word become flesh this Christmas, be amazed and encouraged. The Lord loves you so much that he came to share our weird and weak and wonderful human bodies. And he values the work that you’re doing in his creation. Let’s not take the wonder of that for granted this Christmas.
