While we await the incarnation of Jesus during the Advent season, it is also good to remember that creation itself is an act of incarnation. Eriugena, an early medieval Irish philosopher, said that every creature is a theophany – a manifestation of the divine. God and the world are not separate things shouting across an empty hall at one another. Rather, the world is inside God and made of God.
Christ has two natures. He is both created and creator, man and God, temporal and eternal. His human nature is the totality of all creation. His divine nature is the ineffable mystery of God. In this way, he unites what is ineffable with what is intelligible, containing all of heaven and earth within his embrace.
In his letter to the Colossians, Paul refers to Christ as an ‘image of the invisible God.’ One assumes he is making a deliberate reference to Genesis and the creation of humanity in the image and likeness of God. For Paul, the human being and the Son of God are in some sense one and the same. God is revealed to her creation through the humanity of her Son. In Paul’s words,
“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:15-17 NRSVUE)
We are an image of an image, a reflection of Christ’s ultimate human nature. His humanity is the totality of all things that are, have been, and are yet to be. The heavens are his mind, the material world is his body. The visible creation is the material universe – stones, fish, and stars. The invisible creation is the spiritual realms – the angelic hosts who give form to what is visible. All things are one in Christ Jesus.
It is easy to assume that our spirit is inside our bodies, tucked away in the empty space between our brain cells. Perhaps that is where God put it when she breathed into Adam’s nostrils, bringing him to life like Frosty the Snowman. In a certain sense this is true. Our skin is the boundary of our individuality, beyond which lies all that is other. Spirituality, on the other hand, is a matter of the heart, an inner prayer of contemplation.
However, the two-ness of human nature is inverted when considered as a whole. The inside is actually the outside and the outside is actually the inside. We are like a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Our angelic nature is what encircles and gives life to our animal nature.
Our embodied existence receives organisation, structure, and function from our spiritual life. When the soul leaves the body, the body begins to rot and decay as the same molecules that once teemed with life return to dust, scattered over the face of the earth. The soul is what held them together and without it the only form they have is that of inert matter.
In the same way creation exists in Christ, diffused with his presence, so too the human body exists within its soul. Our body is held in the tender embrace of our spirit, which permeates the body in the same way the ocean permeates a fish. The fish is contained by the water and yet the very same water flows through it and gives it life. Aelred of Rievaulx described this beautifully in his book Dialogue on the Soul,
“The human soul, made in the image of its creator, acts in its own body in somewhat the same fashion as does God in all his creatures. Therefore it fills its whole body, but not locally. For if it were diffused or extended locally, it would also be greater in the whole than in the part. And so it is everywhere in the body that is subject to it, if not filling it, nonetheless imitating the likeness of him who is everywhere in all his creatures.” (Trans by Talbot)
And so, dear sisters and brothers, the incarnation is something from the past but it is also in the present and future. In an act of self giving love, the whole of everything poured itself into the particularity of a new born baby. That was the mystery of Christmas day and it is also the mystery of every birth, the mystery of your own incarnation. You are an embodied manifestation of God.
This Christmas set aside a few moments amid the visiting and celebrations to remember the one who’s image you bear, in whose likeness you were made. Hold a space for Immanuel, which means God is with us, to be born within you. Even though he will be everywhere since before the beginning.
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