"What if God was one of us..."
(A song I kept hearing on the radio)

Jesus was an ordinary man. So ordinary that noone took much notice of him until he was about thirty. If there was anything miraculous about his birth or childhood, as some people later said, then it must have been a well-kept secret in his home town. But after he turned thirty, something happened. Some people thought he'd just turned strange. "Isn't that the carpenter's son?" they asked, and dismissed him without a thought. Other people thought he was dangerous, an unpredictable and disruptive element in society. Better get rid of him. Yet there were many who went down on their knees, and confessed that when they were near him, they felt they were in the presence of God.

But this was a different kind of God from the one they had been taught about. This God set the highest possible standards for human behaviour - but offered forgiveness and love to all, irrespective of how badly they failed to live up to his standards. This was a God whose wish was not to bind people with a multitude of regulations - but to change their hearts, so that the good life could come naturally. This was a God whose very essence was the giving of himself to his creation, up to and including the giving of his own life - which brings us to Easter...

And Jesus, the ordinary man from Nazareth, lived and taught with such authority, such humility, such love, that people afterwards said that he not only showed us God: He was God. A man so possessed of God's Spirit that it was impossible to say where the man stopped and the divine started. A man so attuned to the will of God, that God's will and his will were the same. Christmas isn't about a little baby called Jesus. It's about the arrival on earth of God himself, stripped of pretty well everything but his love for mankind.

Can the Creator enter his creation and become a part of it? Can the almighty God be born as a child, and grow up as a man among men? It's one of the impossible paradoxes of Christianity. But when those who knew him sat down to try and work out who they had followed, and what kind of a man he was - this was the only conclusion that fitted the facts. God had become one of us.

Theological afterword:

"When a sunbeam goes out from the sun, it is a part of the sun; but the sun is itself in the beam, because it is a sunbeam. Nevertheless - the sun is not divided by sending out sunbeams; it is enlarged. In the same way, Christ is spirit of spirit and God of God, just as a candle is lit by another. Because he comes from God, he is God, and God's Son, and both are one God... This "sunbeam" of God has, according to the prophets' word, come down to a virgin, and been born as a human being, united with God. This man grows up, preaches, works, teaches. This is Christ." (From Tertullian's defence of the Christians, 197 AD)

[next]