He came down …

The two most recent post in this series on the Nicene faith have turned our attention to the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, namely his divinity, which he shares in full with the Father, and the fact that everything that he did and does is “for us and for our salvation.” The next two posts will look specifically at what it was Jesus did. Today we’re going to look at the Incarnation, about which the Creed says, Who [i.e., Jesus] “came down from heaven and was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became human.”

The descent of the Son of God into our world is an expression of all that God is for us. Nowhere is this idea better expressed than in the Philippians 2 hymn, which says of Christ:

Who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave… (Philippians 2.6-7)

The Son of God did not come down to earth to enact his privileges and rule as a king, but set aside all privileges to serve and heal broken humanity. In this act, God sets the tone for how all of us should live: in support of and for the sake of the poor, the sick, the lonely, the outcast, the marginalized — anyone looked upon as ‘other’ or ‘lower’ in our society.

In Jesus’ case this took the shape of the Incarnation, in which God lived a real, genuine human life, from womb to tomb. This is emphasized in the Creed by its use of the Greek root sark- ‘flesh’ instead of som- ‘body’. The particular emphasis, which is also found in the prologue to John’s Gospel (”The Word became flesh and dwelt among us…”), comes from the fact that sark- had a rather negative connotation in the New Testament. Paul uses is specifically to describe those drives and impulses of embodied life that might cause us to confuse ‘want’ with ‘need’, and lead us astray from God and our responsibilities to others. The Son of God, according to the Creed, took on not just the form of a human body, but the whole experience of being human, including appetites like hunger, thirst, desire for safety and security, and lust. It’s a dramatic word.

The Creed then ascribes the activity of Incarnation to both God, in the form of the Holy Spirit, and to Jesus’ earthly mother, Mary. This in and of itself is remarkable, as it’s a claim that what we consider to be God’s greatest act was in fact a collaboration requiring full, knowing, and intentional participation by a human person, the young woman Mary. As a doctrine, the virgin birth of Jesus has gone through cycles of varying importance throughout history. At first, it was seen as a fulfillment of Scripture and a challenge to Roman the emerging imperial mythologies that contained their own stories of miraculous births. At other times, it was insisted on as a rebuttal to Jewish claims that Jesus was the bastard son of a Roman soldier and an engaged Jewish girl. And still at others, it has been seen as decisive proof of Jesus’ divinity or as proof of Mary’s purity and sinlessness. (The Roman Empire was, as it happens, a cultural milieu where a radical sexual conservatism was becoming dominant, and Christianity inherited this spirit as much as it contributed to it.) Whatever we may think about it, the main point is, again, that the Incarnation was a collaborative act of God and woman. And that is beautiful.

Finally, it says that the Son of God “became human.” It is to a large extent synonymous with ‘became incarnate,’ but it is a broader term that doesn’t share the same focus on embodiment. Everything that we are as humans was shared by Jesus. This is of critical importance when we think of the spirituality of the Creed. For, once again, the early Christian understanding of salvation was heavily incarnational. In later theological controversies, the principle of Christian orthodoxy would emerge that “That which is not assumed [in the sense of ‘taken on’ by God] is not healed.” It’s the idea that in the Incarnation, God takes on the full human experience and fills it with the divine life, healing it and enabling it to be all that it can be. If the likeness of God inherent in the human condition in creation was broken by the Fall, then the Incarnation heals it and allows those of us who trust him, follow him, and live as he lived are enabled to live out our human vocation once again.

So, then, there are three main spiritual takeaways from this section of the Creed: First, as Christians we are called to have “the same mind that was in Christ” (Philippians 2.5) — the hymn quoted above is not about setting Jesus apart as special (though it certainly does that), but calls us to that same self-emptying, other-oriented spirit and way of life. Just as the Son of God did not stay in the comfortable places, safe and secure within divinity, but descended in to the muck and mire of human life, so too are we called out of our own comfort zones and into the mess of it all. Christianity knows no gated communities. Second, we are called to see where God might be wanting to collaborate with us — it certainly won’t be like how God collaborated with Mary, but all of us in our own ways are called to co-create with God something of christ within us for the life of the world. And third, we are called to live into the shared human vocation to bear the image and likeness of God to all creation, to acknowledge that image and likeness in others, and to walk and tend to the earth in healthy and generative ways.

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Only-Begotten, Who was begotten of the Father before all ages, light from light, true God from true God, Begotten not made, Who is of the same essence as the Father, Through whom all things exist. Who, for us humans and for our salvation, came down from heaven, And was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became human…