Why Jesus Came

At Christmas, we celebrate Jesus’ birth. What happened that is worth celebrating? There are many reasons for joy, but underneath them all is something John declares in the prologue of his gospel: The Word became flesh (John 1:14). 

To understand this statement, it helps to know that the Greek word for “word” is logos, and logos is one of those big Bible words that we don't have a good equivalent for! Logos can refer to:

1. The rational organizing principle behind all creation; the source of order, light, and life to all things and all people (see John 1:1-4).
2. The inner thought or reason of a person.
3. The outward expression of a person’s inner thought. Thus, God’s message self-revelation.
4. In the OT, God’s Word creates, speaks, and saves. All these actions express his nature and character.

The logos is God’s self-expression, conveying truth and life through creation and salvation. It takes shape; it gets things done. This is supremely true in the incarnation when the divine Word became flesh in the body of Jesus. Life appeared. Truth walked and talked among us. Salvation came in a person. New creation was begun by an embodied God.

Why does it matter that the Word of God had a body? Couldn’t God have revealed himself in some other way? Couldn’t he have just spoken, or dropped instructions from heaven, or just spiritually descended on someone, as the Gnostics proposed? Actually, God had already done those things. He had shown himself through creation and prophecy. He had communicated through the book of nature and the book of Scripture.

To understand the need for the incarnation of the Word, we need to go back to the opening stories of the Bible. The Word came as a man, in a body, to undo the work done by the first man. This is the argument Saint Athanasius made in his treatise On the Incarnation of the Word. I'll sketch the first major argument of the treatise below.

God faced a dilemma. Because of Adam’s sin, human image-bearers were subject to corruption and death. In the biblical story, Adam is not just the first human; he’s the representative human. Adam's actions affected all his descendants. 

What did Adam’s sin mean for his children? For Athanasius, one important result was corruption that led to a loss of being, a diminishing of existence, a slide back into nothingness, a move from life to death. God gave Adam and Eve life as a generous gift. Instead of guarding his gift, they grasped for more and lost what they had.

Isn’t this just what we humans do? Our culture promotes it. Before Christmas ends, ads will beckon us to “after Christmas sales,” so that the day after we celebrate God’s greatest gift we can rush out to get what we don’t yet have! What if we just gave thanks and enjoyed the Gift instead of always seeking more? In all our grasping, we lose out on what we’ve been given.

Because Adam didn’t guard God’s gift but grasped for more, he lost it for all of us. He exchanged eternal life, with-God life, for corruption and death. How should we imagine this corruption? Think of rusting metal or decaying flesh. Corruption eats us from the inside.

Corruption diminishes our existence, which means the image of God disappears from the world. The effects ripple out. Because image bearers are not functioning as rulers and stewards of creation, the whole cosmos devolves into chaos and destruction. Corruption drives us down and makes us live in fear of death. In a fallen world, death prevails just as God said it would (When you eat of [the fruit], you shall surely die. Gen 2:17). The Apostle Paul said, “By the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man” (Rom 5:17). In a world so dominated by corruption and death, what should God do?

• Should he call it a good attempt, throw in the towel and give up on his creation? What kind of creator would do that? To neglect or abandon his creation would be dishonorable and unfitting of his goodness!
• Couldn’t God just forgive? Perhaps, but then he’d be a liar. He said, “You shall surely die.” In other words: “the wages of sin is death.” Sin happened. Death had to follow. God didn’t want eternally diminished humans. We needed to die in order to be reborn (cf. Matt 16:25).
• Couldn't God just call people to repent? Wouldn’t that be enough? No. Repentance would only fix symptoms; it wouldn’t undo corruption and death. God is not like the modern health care industry. He doesn’t want to treat symptoms and perpetuate root causes. He doesn’t want to give us the appearance of health while we rot from the inside out. He wants us truly healthy and whole!

If our problem is corruption that leads to diminished existence and death, then only the Creator can bring us out of our corruption. Only the one who gives us existence can renew our existence. Only the source of all being can restore our being. Only the true Life can rescue us from the grip of death. In other words, restoring humanity is a work only God could pull off! No one dominated by death is able to conquer death.

Reversing corruption requires an external agent but an internal work. Rusting metal needs more than a coat of paint. It needs to be purged and reconstituted at the atomic level. The change happens internally but not by itself. A cancer patient needs a doctor, but she also needs medicine to enter her body and destroy cancer cells and regenerate life-giving cells. God is both doctor and medicine. He comes from outside to heal, and he enters the human race—into the depth of our sinful existence “in Adam”—to transform the human race. He bears our sickness and pain, our sorrow and death “in his body on the tree,” and when he breaks out of the tomb alive, he defeats the corruption and death that held us in chains of fear. In a world ruled by corruption and death, the eternal, incorruptible Word puts on a body in order to conquer corruption in the human body. As we all experience sin and death “in Adam,” so we all experience righteousness and life “in Christ” because he conquered death in his flesh.

This great victory began at the first Christmas—or nine months before—when, as the Angel said, the Holy Spirit came upon Mary and the power of the Most High overshadowed her so that a holy human life was conceived in her. That is why we call him the Son of God (see Luke 1:35). God condescends. He comes down and becomes like us—all the way to the depth of our human condition—in order to save us. This is why we celebrate Christmas! Sometimes we think Jesus was immune; he must not have experienced all the harsh realities of human life the way we do because, after all, he was God right? Wrong. Jesus was not immune. The embodied Word carried our sin, disease, and death, and, by going through death, he defeated them and brought about our re-creation.

So as you celebrate this Christmas, remember what happened in Bethlehem: Immanuel happened; God came among us to be with us. Incarnation happened; God became like us to save us. God’s Word isn’t just in a book, though the Book anticipated and pointed toward his incarnation. Nor did the divine Word come in a dazzling display, though this would have been appropriate. God came humbly, and he fully entered our fallen Adamic existence in order to save us from corruption and death and raise us up to eternal, incorruptible life. Glory to God in the highest!