Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
The Grand Miracle.
That’s how C. S. Lewis described the Son of God coming “in the flesh” at Bethlehem. And he writes, “The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation.”
If anyone had asked me, I might at first have been inclined to say that the “central miracle” is Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, his atonement for our sins, and his glorious Resurrection. And it certainly would be hard to over-estimate the centrality of those events. The message of the apostles, the good news that his followers have always proclaimed, has rightly centered on the “death, burial, and Resurrection” of our Lord.
If we underestimate the power of the cross and those amazing events, Christianity quickly dissolves into a human-centered glorified “self-help” religion that focuses on our ability to “pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps” and becomes, at its center, based on our own ability to “achieve” salvation. It can become a “cross-less and bloodless” venture more about our power than God’s.
Do a few better things than bad things, work hard enough to “get life right,” follow the right rules and be a member of exactly the right group, and you’ll be OK. That’s what religion tends to be all about, right? Being “right.” Being “good.”
Yes, that’s what so much man-made “religion” is indeed about. But that’s not what genuine Christianity is about.
Part and parcel of the “good news” is that faith centered on Christ, trust focused in him, is not about how good we are, or how bad we are. It’s about Whose we are. It is completely centered on what Christ has done for us and his power at work within us, healing our souls when we fall short, helping us do the “good works” created “in advance” for us to do. Whether we’re doing well, or doing poorly - and, honestly, most days we “do” both - the focus is on the One in whom we trust, not on ourselves at all.
Both pardon and power are ours through his saving work, not our own.
But before Christ’s work could be accomplished, the Incarnation had to happen. For God to suffer and die as the perfect sacrifice for humanity, he had to become fully human. For God to truly carry away our sin and guilt, he had to be fully divine. Nothing less than both would do. And nothing less is the message of Christianity.
Hence, the Incarnation. Hence, Immanuel, “God with us.”
For most of this world’s existence, the “gods” were thought to be either too far above humanity to care about us, or too magnificent to lower themselves to have anything to do with us. They were often thought to be at enmity with us.
But central to Christianity is the miracle of the omnipotent God loving us so much that he would literally come into this world to save us, that he would become “God in the flesh.”
And so the Apostle John points us to the Grand Miracle: “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).
And come our King did. As the great Scottish preacher and writer George MacDonald put it in the first verse of a poem entitled, “A Christmas Carol” (often called “Mary’s Lullaby” to “avoid confusion” with Charles Dickens’ masterpiece), “Babe Jesus lay in Mary’s lap, / The sun shone in his hair; / And this is how she saw, mayhap, / The crown already there.”
The crown of the King of Glory. The crown that would one day be a crown of thorns.
At Bethlehem, God came down to lift us up. The Incarnation. The “Grand Miracle” indeed.
“For thou art the king of men, my son; / Thy crown I see it plain! / And men shall worship thee, every one, / And cry, Glory! Amen!” (“Mary’s Lullaby,” verse three).
Curtis Shelburne writes about faith for The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him at:
