Holiday Blues, a Lamborghini, and the Incarnation
Over the years, the holiday season has been rough on Gayline and me. Three parents have died during the season, including my dad on Christmas Day. We’ve received a son’s cancer diagnosis on Christmas Eve. We began noticing my own early signs of cancer during the holidays. Several severe family and church crises have struck between Thanksgiving and Christmas. And more recently, I had a jawbone biopsy and received my diagnosis of actinomycosis (an ongoing severe jawbone infection/disease) around Thanksgiving. Throw in a house fire one Thanksgiving weekend, another holiday when we were displaced from a home of our own, plus assorted other trials, and one gets the idea.
As for my ongoing stage four cancer, it will affect every holiday season from here on out. Unless God heals me—which of course he can do—the holidays will always arrive with a hovering cloud of uncertainty.
Being honest, in light of all this, sometimes I struggle to believe that God sees and cares. Sometimes life can feel like I’ve been pegged for a cosmic experiment to discover how much a human can bear during the holidays (and all the year long).
But then Christmas gives me hope that he does see and care; and that he loves me after all. For Christmas proves that God is not a cruel sadist who delights in my pain, or a passive observer who shrugs off my pain, or a hand-wringing observer who is helpless before my pain, or a cold-hearted researcher who is testing me for pain thresholds and tolerances, but a willing Companion-Victor who has entered into my pain to deliver me from it all.
In what may be the crown jewel of Christmas texts, Paul writes that Jesus, the eternal Son of God and God the Son: “…[was] in the form of God, [but] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men…” (Phil. 2:5–8).
I notice the strangely-connected phrase, “…He emptied himself, by taking…” How do you empty by taking (i.e. taking on)? Don’t you empty by taking out or taking away? Yet, Jesus, who was in the form of God (the exact shining forth of God’s being), made himself less by taking on more; by being born a human. Someone has called this subtraction by addition. By adding a human nature to his divine, the eternal Son of God emptied himself of his shining glory.
Imagine that Gayline surprises me this Christmas with a $200,000 Lamborghini in all its shining glory (complete with a massive red Christmas bow on top). Then imagine me slapping fifteen bumper stickers onto it. If I were to do that, I’d be subtracting by adding. My add-ons would diminish its splendor.
Likewise, we would diminish a blue whale’s glory by wrapping it in a tadpole’s skin. And as anyone should know: you don’t improve a filet mignon by pouring on the ketchup. When it comes to perfection, more is less.
The point is this: the pre-Bethlehem Son of God was God the Son, resplendent in the glory he shared eternally with the Father and Spirit in the presence of adoring angels (Isa. 6:1–3; John 12:41; 17:5). So, by agreeing to “add on” and “squeeze into” a human body and nature (Heb. 10:5–7), he subtracted. This was not to the diminishment of his actual deity but to the diminishment or veiling of his visible blazing glory. This is why, when his contemporaries saw Jesus in the flesh, they saw only a man. His deity was largely obscured.
We read that the Word (God, the Son) who, in the beginning, was with God and was God, became flesh, and by this condescending love he has dwelt among us, and has become Emmanuel: God with us and one of us. By partaking of our flesh and blood, he has unashamedly made us true “brothers” in the human experience (Matt. 1:23; John 1:1, 14; Heb. 2:11–14).
Here is a God like no other. He is neither distant nor disinterested. He doesn’t stand by idly while we suffer. Even less does he inflict suffering with sadistic glee or mere clinical interest. Heaven forbid. Instead, he has entered our world of pain, to share in that pain, and to deliver us from it.
God, the eternal Son, laid aside his majesty to enter our shame. He removed a crown of glory to wear a crown of thorns. He exchanged heaven for a manger, a throne for a donkey, a scepter for a cross, the endless praises of an angelic host for the crucifying blood-lust of an angry mob, the Father’s favor for the Father’s abandonment, and the royal throne room of eternity for a crudely cut, stone-cold grave.
“Veiled in flesh the godhead see; Hail the incarnate deity! Please as man with men to dwell; Jesus our Emmanuel” (Charles Wesley).
The Savior has not ignored us at all. For he took on all human heartaches and headaches to rescue us from all those heartaches and headaches once and for all.
In this light, let us bless the Lord with whole-souled praise. Let us come and adore him, by joining voices with all the saints in heaven above and on earth below, to overcome the holiday blues and to make this our holiest and merriest Christmas ever!