At Christmas, incarnation and revelation go hand in hand. God becomes flesh, and God grants us knowledge of himself. In Bethlehem, the immortal Creator of all is manifest in a mortal creature. The Lord shows himself forth in all his works, but in the incarnation, we see the nature and perfection of the one true God with maximal clarity and beauty (Heb. 1:1–4).
To be sure, the Incarnation isn’t limited to Christmas. It begins in the womb of Mary, continues throughout the whole earthly life of Jesus, and reaches its climax at the cross and empty tomb. Even now the risen and ascended Jesus remains incarnate, since he did not slough off his humanity when the Father raised him up to heaven to sit at his right hand. In point of fact, the Lord Jesus will remain human into all eternity. In this lies our hope, for “when Christ appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). He is the one truly human being who ever lived. Jesus is our brother forever.
Yet for all this, Christmas is the proper moment to dwell on the Incarnation, because the birth of Jesus is God’s own entrance into the world—his transition from hiddenness to openness, from invisibility to visibility, from silence to speech. When the baby cries, God’s Word is with us, a voluble Immanuel in the form of a speechless newborn.
What sign is this? What does it mean that God became an infant? The claim is so preposterous—yet so marvelous—that even with the best of intentions our attempts to understand it go astray.
One danger is to reverse the terms of God’s humanization by anthropomorphizing God. He’s just like us, we muse. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth coined the phrase “the humanity of God,” and although he did not mean it this way, it can suggest a version of the Christmas gospel that brings heaven to earth in exactly the wrong manner: projecting onto God whatever we think is best about us humans.
If incarnation is about revelation, though, we have to let God tell us about himself, not the other way around. We don’t know God before he introduces himself; we can’t speak on his behalf. And his speech, always and everywhere, is Jesus (John 1:1–18). When we turn the page to Bethlehem, the Lord speaks loud enough for the whole world to hear.
This is why it is fitting to include the Magi in our celebration of the Nativity, even though they were there not on the night of the birth but later, when Jesus was a toddler (Matt. 2:16). The Magi represent Gentiles. They anticipate the coming of all nations to the Lord of Israel, bending the knee and paying homage to the one God and Creator of all (Zech. 8:20–23). “Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too, since there is only one God” (Rom. 3:29–30).
Another wrong turn comes when we sentimentalize Christmas. I’ll admit that this is next to inevitable, given the mother and baby at its center, but we can at least be aware of the temptation. And it’s worth avoiding for a simple reason: Jesus Christ was born to die. In this he is unlike the rest of us, however brief or painful our lives may be. The Lord was always bound for the Cross, for the anguish of the Passion and the blood-mingled tears of Gethsemane. He was always going to be abandoned, denied, and betrayed by his friends. Whatever else we say of him—hymning him in his peaceful sleep, imagining him nursing at Mary’s breast, admiring the family crèche—we must not forget this.
Finally, while we are right to see humility at Christmas, the question is: What does it mean to call God humble? To be humble is to be lowly, and God is not lowly in himself. Rather, he becomes lowly for our sake. Nor is God weak, though he assumes our weakness to grant us his strength. Nor still is the humility of Bethlehem imposed upon God, as if it manifested an incapacity or lack.
No, the humility revealed at Christmas is the willingness of God, in his infinite love for sinners, to stoop down to our level, regardless of worldly appearances, regardless of the consequences for himself. In this sense we might apply the beloved line from Hebrews 12:2—that Jesus scorned the shame of the cross—to the manger as well. To be found a weakling in a bed of straw is, from the vantage of the powerful, nothing if not shameful. But the Lord scorns the infamy of the high and mighty to join himself to the low and weakly.
As Paul writes, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God” (1 Cor. 1:27–29, ESV). Paul is speaking about the “foolishness” of the Cross (vv. 18–25), but what is true of Good Friday applies to Christmas too.
For this reason, it’s worth stepping back from Joseph and Mary and the shepherds to ask what else the manger reveals of God, especially those things that might not seem obvious from first glance at a baby boy placed among farm animals. I’m thinking in particular of what theologians call the attributes of God: omnipotence, omniscience, and so on. These are what it means for God to be God, characteristics that define God as Creator in distinction from us creatures. They’re true of him in a way that could not be true of anyone or anything else.
Christmas sets God’s attributes in relief in beautiful and unexpected ways. For instance, think again of humility. There is nothing surprising in the weakness of a baby. All newborns are utterly dependent on their mothers for life and sustenance. What is surprising, then, is what the gospel adds to this: namely, the child in Mary’s arms is one and the same as the God who created her and even now sustains her in existence. The nursing babe is none other than he in whom all things hold together (Col. 1:17) and apart from whom nothing has been made (John 1:3).
Only a God with whom all things are possible (Matt. 19:26) can become incarnate in the form of an infant. The old hymn is therefore right to say, “Jesus, Lord, at thy birth!” For God’s “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). When we peer into the manger and glimpse the Christ child, we need double vision. We are seeing weakness, yes, but also the matchless might that made the universe.
Then there’s God’s transcendence. Children sometimes imagine a physical deity who lives in the sky but leaves for a while to come to earth—the way a president might leave the capitol to go abroad for a time—then returns to the heavens, resuming a throne left temporarily empty.
Transcendence describes God’s utter difference from created existence and thus his remove from any and all limitations we take for granted. God shows himself transcendent at Christmas by remaining God even as he takes on our nature. As the church fathers liked to put it, in becoming human, the Lord assumed what he was not while remaining what he was. Jesus isn’t either divine or human. He isn’t a hybrid or a half god, like Hercules, or a “semi-demi-mini-god,” like Disney’s Maui. He’s fully divine and fully human, all that it means to be God and all that it means to be human—and yet a single person, undivided.
He is this, he can do this, because he transcends us. Being absolutely transcendent, he can be absolutely immanent, or near, to us. The one entails the other. In the words of Saint Augustine, God is “more inward than my most inward part and higher than the highest element within me.” If he were otherwise, he would be limited in some way and thus unable to be both our Savior and our brother, both our Lord and our friend, both our judge and our pardon.
In short, Christmas reveals God to be wholly unlike the gods of the nations, beyond myths and legends and idols of every kind. Only the God besides whom there is no other (Isa. 45:5) can become one of us without ceasing to be himself—without leaving heaven vacant. The Lord who sits on the throne also sleeps in Bethlehem. This is the mystery of the Incarnation.
The final attribute I want to lift up is wisdom. Wisdom is another word for God’s knowledge, or omniscience. God possesses complete understanding of everything. He teaches but is not taught. His knowledge, like his power, is limited by nothing and lacks nothing.
That knowledge is not like a computer—or perhaps an AI chatbot, minus the errors and hallucinations. God is not ChatGPT scaled up to have every answer to everything. His knowledge is his wisdom, and his wisdom comprehends far more than a flawless record on trivia night.
Spoken of God, wisdom means something like the skill of an artist applied not only to the mind but also to actions, plans, and purposes. It means that God always does the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, for the right reason. His actions, in other words, are virtuous; he acts with righteousness without exception.
But he also acts beautifully. God’s wisdom is the movement in the symphony that makes it a masterpiece, the turn in the plot that makes you catch your breath, the unexpected move that in retrospect couldn’t have happened any other way. It’s so apt to the moment, so fitting to the need, that it’s obvious after the fact but couldn’t have been guessed in advance. It’s the father running to embrace the prodigal (Luke 15:20), the Samaritan stopping to help the man by the side of the road (10:33–34), the assumption of Mary that the risen Lord was a gardener (John 20:15).
And God’s wisdom is Christ himself, born in Bethlehem to a virgin from Nazareth. It’s Mary, the last in a line of Israel’s miraculous mothers, from Sarah and Rachel to Ruth and Hannah. It’s Joseph, who like his namesake brings his family down to Egypt for protection. It’s Herod, another Pharaoh intent on preserving his tyranny from the threat of Hebrew boys. It’s angels and animals, fellow creatures from Genesis’ opening chapter who greet the birth of their Creator in a stable. It’s shepherds, who marvel at the pronouncement that Israel’s royal shepherd has finally come.
All these and more fill the divine artist’s canvas, revealing the master storyteller in his incomparable wisdom. Every detail is in its place. Everything in the narrative was preparing for this. And now that we see it, we cannot help but step back in awe and wonder at our God. The Lord is great and greatly to be praised (Ps. 145:3). He has drawn near to his people in their need. With the “multitude of the heavenly host” (Luke 2:13, ESV), the only thing left to do is worship.
