What we celebrate on Christmas is the birth, not just of a great teacher, but of the Son of God. Jesus is God incarnate. He is Immanuel, God with us. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … And the Word became flesh” (John 1.1, 14). If it were not so, Christmas—and all other Christian holidays and celebrations—is a waste of time and effort and resources.
Reggie Kidd, in an article entitled “Mystery Matters,” reflects on the mystery that is Jesus—fully God, fully human. He insists that there is no wisdom and no eternal benefit in attempting to downplay the fullness of the mystery of Jesus. “Make Jesus less than fully divine or less than fully human. Either way, he becomes more plausible, more understandable … more, well … marketable.” And such a marketable Jesus is not the true Jesus. He becomes a harmless sage that we can choose to admire or to ignore, with no apparent consequences.
But Jesus is God. And his coming to this world as a human being does have eternal implications that one must not ignore.
Because Jesus is God, he is the One “who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1.29). Only God has the authority to forgive. Mark 2.1-12 records an event during his ministry here on earth. Jesus without hesitation declares a person forgiven of his sins. And the religious leaders of his day objected. They insisted that God alone can forgive sins. And in that they were right. But they were wrong in rejecting Jesus as one who could forgive sins because they did not recognize him as the “Son of Man” (the Messiah), God in the flesh.
Only God can save. The early church recognized that “salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved” (Acts 4.12 NIV). The unmistakable reference of the “name” in this passage is that of Jesus. Throughout the New Testament the united declaration is that salvation is in Christ alone. Kidd reminds us, “if he is not God, then he doesn’t really save. We’re left to try to save ourselves.”
God became human because, in order to “rescue us, Jesus had to become one of us. The incarnation was not a ‘drive by salvation.’” He defeated sin and death “in the flesh” so that we, who are “in the flesh,” might be liberated to live “in the Spirit” (Romans 8.1-4).
Jesus: fully God, fully human. This is the mystery of the Christ.
–Keith Y. Jainga