John 1:1-2
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God. He was with God in the beginning.
John 1:14
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his
glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace
and truth.
Did you
ever think, when you were a child, what fun it would be if your toys could come
to life? Well suppose you could really have brought them to life. Imagine
turning a tin soldier into a real little man. It would involve turning the tin
into flesh. And suppose the tin soldier did not like it. He is not interested
in flesh: all he sees is that the tin is being spoilt. He thinks you are
killing him. He will do everything he can to prevent you. He will not be made
into a man if he can help it. [Note: Perhaps, we could better imagine a
stubborn plastic action figure ;) ]
What you would have done about that tin soldier I do not
know. But what God did about us was this. The Second Person in God, the Son,
became human Himself: was born into the world as an actual man—a real man of a
particular height, with hair of a particular colour, speaking a particular
language, weighing so many stone. The Eternal Being, who knows everything and
who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby,
and before that a foetus inside a Woman’s body. If you want to get
the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab.
The result of this was that you now had one man who really
was what all men were intended to be: one man in whom the created life, derived
from His Mother, allowed itself to be completely and perfectly turned into the
begotten life. The natural human creature in Him was taken up fully into the
divine Son. Thus in one instance humanity had, so to speak, arrived:
had passed into the life of Christ. And because the whole difficulty for us is
that the natural life has to be, in a sense, ‘killed’, He chose an earthly
career which involved the killing of His human desires at every turn—poverty,
misunderstanding from His own family, betrayal by one of His intimate friends,
being jeered at and manhandled by the Police, and execution by torture. And
then, after being thus killed—killed every day in a sense—the human creature in
Him, because it was united to the divine Son, came to life again. The Man in
Christ rose again: not only the God. That is the whole point. For the first
time we saw a real man. One tin soldier—real tin, just like the rest—had come
fully and splendidly alive.
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