Jesus loved us so much that he became one of us. That is the wonder of Christmas.
I love my dog but I would never want to become him.
That would mean that I would put on the limitations that he has as a dog. As a human becoming dog, I would operate on instinct rather than inspiration and creativity. My range of emotions and feelings would be limited and sparse. Any power I possessed would only be confined to a few senses that for the most part wouldn’t benefit any one else but myself. I would lose an awareness of the larger world around me. I would lose imagination and the ability to improve myself on my own.
This is the limiting and confined experience that Jesus gladly took on when he became one of us. Christ, the Son of God, “did not see equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.” Is there a more beautiful and amazing piece of scripture in all of the Bible than those words?
In another spot in scripture, it says that in Jesus we have a leader who can be “touched with the feelings of our weeknesses.” Paul Brand and Philip Yancey state, “God wasn’t satisfied enough to just love us from a distance but came along side us.”
Though Jesus was all divine and all human the packaging of the flesh and bone must have been so burdensome and fraught with potential problems that Jesus must have had moments of clear bewilderment at his existence on this Earth. Yet, he chose the incarnation to serve us, to demonstrate love to us, to teach us, to heal us, to cover us with mercy, to live a life that no one else could live so that he could die a death that no one else could die to bring us new life that no one else could bring.
God’s son loved us enough to become us. Who would do that? That is the wonder of Jesus that we celebrate each year at Christmas.
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