The Wondrous Incarnation

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 


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. 

- The Gospel of John, Chapter One, verses one and fourteen

When the God, whose voice created a vast universe replete with planets, stars, galaxies and quasars, chose to breathe His own essence into one of His creatures, Goodness was defined. But when He chose to humble Himself and become one of them just to reveal His deity, Goodness was overlaid and infused with incomprehensible Love. This moment, the birth of Jesus Christ, is the single most amazing moment in history.

Bono, in his conversation with writer Michka Assayas describes the moment when he first understood the astounding beauty of the incarnation like this:

Got home for Christmas, very excited of being in Dublin. Dublin at Christmas is cold, but it's lit up, it's like Carnival in the cold. On Christmas Eve, I went to St. Patrick's Cathedral. I had done school there for a year. It's where Jonathan Swift was dean. Anyway, some of my Church of Ireland friends were going. It's a kind of a tradition on Christmas Eve to go, but I'd never been. I went to this place, sat. I was given a really bad seat, behind one of the huge pillars. I couldn't see anything. I was sitting there, having come back from Tokyo, or somewhere like that. I went for the singing, because I love choral singing. Community arts, a specialty! But I was falling asleep, being up for a few days, traveling, because it was a bit boring, the service, and I just started nodding off, I couldn't see a thing. Then I started to try and keep myself awake studying what was on the page. It dawned on me for the first time, really. It had dawned on me before, but it really sank in: the Christmas story. The idea that God, if there is a force of Love and Logic in the universe, that it would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself and describe itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty, in shit and straw... a child... I just thought: "Wow!" Just the poetry... Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable. There it was. I was sitting there, and it's not that it hadn't struck me before, but tears came down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this. Because that's exactly what we were talking about earlier: love needs to find form, intimacy needs to be whispered. To me, it makes sense. It's actually logical. It's pure logic. Essence has to manifest itself. It's inevitable. Love has to become an action or something concrete. It would have to happen. There must be an incarnation. Love must be made flesh.

In the oft-skipped second verse of his famous carol Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Charles Wesley proclaims the jaw-dropping awe produced by this Love becoming flesh:

Christ by highest heav'n adored
Christ the everlasting Lord!
Late in time behold Him come
Offspring of a Virgin's womb
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see
Hail the incarnate Deity
Pleased as man with man to dwell
Jesus, our Emmanuel
Hark! The herald angels sing
"Glory to the newborn King!"

Amen!

May the wondrous incarnation, poor baby boy/God with us, be the core of your hope and joy this Christmas.


If you are a Bono apologist or cynic, and you haven't read Bono in conversation with Michka Assayas, you should. It's available from Riverhead Books.

And if you love Christmas as I do, enjoy this little piece of Glen Hansard's Christmas Eve busk in Dublin. Bono and Liam O'Maonlai join and make it a Christmas to remember.