Christmas Eve

On Christmas Eve. I have been thiking about the incarnaiton and what a contradiction I see in it. Not the usual contradiction though. For years (and by years I mean hundreds of years) the question has been "How can Jesus be God and man, how can God be made flesh, how is God a baby?" This question does not really interest me. I guess it is not a problem in my mind for God to be made and live like a man. One of the things that has happened as I studied was the deconstruction and rebuilding of some ideas. The whole God is ultimatly unlimited and all powerful and eternal and stuff is a greek way of thinking about God. Not so much as how they thought of their gods as how they thought of the infrastructure of the universe...anyway. Some of those things may be more Greek than Hebrew and so may not quite fit the image of God that we have in the Bible. (Which, I may add, does not invalidate the idea of God in the Bible, at least for me)

The contradiction that I struggle with is a more realistic and immediate one. I can see how the Most High, eternal somthing, reached out and touched our nothing to create Jesus. I get the impression that people think God couldnt fit into a human frame because God is too big, or humanity is too unique and rigid to accomodate God. God probably had this in mind when humanity was designed and put in an extra pocket or God-space. The contradiction hits when I consider the world I know. I deal with human crap for a living. there is so much pain out there, so many dumb people doing dumb things to each other. Every sense seems to tell me that we are a race that God has not touched. In the Church where things are supposed to be .... better....its really not for the most part. Rediculous.

So those of us who believe what Jesus said as we have it in the New Testament and who believe in that same story are faced with the challenge of reconciling this. The God who is present must be held in contrast to the crap that is in us. The poison that wants to course out and destroy everything. Sigh.