During a recent podcast recording session, I developed a theological argument about the incarnation that I think it worth unpacking in greater detail. The episode will be released during Advent, so be on the lookout for our next podcast, coming December 10 at 4:00 p.m.
It’s at this time of year that we cultivate a sense of the incarnation with the buildup to the Christmas holiday. We see lots of decorations. There are school performances and church pageants. Our routines change to accommodate a plethora of Christmas parties. Despite the celebrating and decorating, there’s a deep concern about the commercialization of Christmas that questions whether we truly understand the importance of the holiday. We often hear this phrase, “Jesus is the reason for the season.” This article gets at that impulse and questions what exactly we are celebrating. What is it we are doing when we have this big moment in the year that the entire culture celebrates? Furthermore, how does Jesus’ incarnation inform us about the task of teaching. In this article, I argue that we as teachers are performing an incarnational ministry in the lives of our students.
The Incarnate Word
When we celebrate Christmas, we are really celebrating the incarnation of Jesus Christ. It is his bodily incarnation that stands right at the center of God’s salvation plan. The second person of the Trinity took on human flesh and dwelt among us. As Paul writes to the Philippians, Jesus, “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” (Phil 2:6-7). The word “form” here must be carefully explicated. It is not as though he “seemed” like God and “seemed” like a servant only by some outward appearance. John Calvin gets at the heart of Christ’s pre-existent form when he writes:
“The form of God means here his majesty. For as man is known by the appearance of his form, so the majesty which shines forth in God is His figure.”
John Calvin, The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians, Calvin’s Commentaries, trans. T. H. L. Parker (Eerdmans, 1965), 247.
In other words, God’s invisible majesty was the quality or the existence that characterized Jesus before the incarnation. After the incarnation, the quality or the existence that characterized him was that of a servant.
Another word that is worthy of comment is the term “likeness.” This echoes the creation of human beings in Genesis 1:26 where God makes man “according to our image and likeness.” There is something about the creation of human beings that makes the incarnation possible. The “divine spark” that resides in all human beings means there is a unique quality that from the beginning of creation pointed to the connection between God and man.
Another passage that speaks to the divinity of Christ and the essential nature of his incarnation in the accomplishment of our salvation is Hebrews 1:3-4.
“He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.
Hebrews 1:3-4 ESV
We see in this passage the extent to which Jesus was the creative force behind all of creation, both to make it and to sustain it. The author of Hebrews will go on later to reiterate how the creation of the universe by “the word of God” is an essential tenet of faith. We shall explore this concept in just a moment. For now it is important to establish how the eternal Word, the creative force of the universe, the eternal second person of the Trinity was incarnate not as an afterthought or “plan B,” but as the central driving force behind the work of God for our salvation from before the foundations of the world.
I am struck by the poetry of the hymn “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence,” rendered in English by Gerard Moultrie based on the Liturgy of St. James. One stunning phrase from verse 1 reads, “Christ our God to earth descended.” Here is a rich statement packed with the meaning we have explored so far. In verse 2, the liturgy goes on to express the theology of the incarnation, capturing the two natures of Christ and the work of salvation accomplished by his bodily sacrifice.
“King of kings, yet born of Mary,
As of old on earth He stood,
Lord of lords, in human vesture,
In the body and the blood,
He will give to all the faithful
His own self for heav’nly food.”
The Word Made Flesh
Elsewhere I have written about the educational heart of God. This concept has to do with God as a communicator speaking in comprehensible ways. It is both that he reveals himself to all of creation, but also that he has made us to be receptive to that revelation. Obviously, there remains a significant amount of who and what God is that is incomprehensible. Yet, he reveals enough that we may know him as he truly is and may know his plan of salvation.
When God created, he did so by speaking words. We first learn of God’s speech acts in Genesis 1. “And God said, ‘Let there be light,” and there was light.” (Gen 1:3). Each day of creation begins with God creating through his divine speech. Throughout the creation accounts, we can observe how much our God is a speaking God. In Genesis 2 he gives commands, speaks to Adam and expects that Adam will comprehend and obey his commands. Later in Genesis 3 we learn that Adam and Eve walked and talked with God in the garden (Gen. 3:8), and then God speaks to them after they have sinned, providing both the curse and the promise of the seed of salvation. These first three chapters in Genesis establish a framework for expecting that God speaks, we can understand when he speaks, and his speech will reveal to us the way of salvation.
Psalm 33 gives us further insight into the role of the “word” referenced in Hebrews 1. In Psalm 33:6, the psalmist expresses how “by the word of the Lord the heavens were made.” This phrasing sets a trajectory that enables us to understand how the persons of the trinity were involved in creation. The second person, referred to as the Word, was the agent of creation, and accomplished creation through speech.
Creation is not the only way we can understand God’s revealing nature. We can think about this in terms of God revealing words to us in Scripture, his written revelation. Consider how Paul advises Timothy to continue to immerse himself in the scriptures, which are “breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” (1 Tim. 3:16). This adds to the dynamic we are describing here. God makes known his thoughts to us in scripture and has created us so that we can understand these truths.
And then his ultimate communication to us came in what John calls the Word, the logos, that became incarnate. God not only revealed his mind through creation and scripture, but he sent himself in the second person of the trinity, his only Son. The opening of John 1 is packed with insights into this essential moment in the history of salvation.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
John 1:1-5 ESV
Here we have the divine nature of Jesus expressed in no uncertain term. He is the Word that was with God and was God. He is also the light that comes into the darkness, into the world that he has made.
The gospel goes on to say, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14). This is the human nature of Jesus. This is the miracle that stands at the center of our salvation. God’s Word takes on human flesh. It is necessary for Jesus to be both fully human and fully divine in order to be offered as a perfect sacrifice for us.
The incarnation, therefore, is a central tenet of our faith. It is one of the two miracles upon which God accomplishes the work of salvation. Incarnation and resurrection together rest upon the divine and human natures of Christ Jesus. He must share the perfect holiness of God to be a worthy sacrifice. He must share our bodily nature in order to fully represent us in that sacrifice.
Incarnational Teaching
It is my firm conviction that the incarnation serves as a model for the Christian life in general and the presence of the teacher in the classroom specifically. I was recently reading a passage in the book Living in Union with Christ, written by Grant Macaskill (who happens to be one of my PhD supervisors). He writes:
“There is … a correspondence between what happened in the incarnation and what happens in us as our corrupt patterns of thought are transformed by the Spirit, our appetites are realigned, and our decisions are sanctified. In both cases, weak flesh is brought into proper communion with God through the work of the Spirit of the Son. That’s where the hope of Christian optimism lies: ‘If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Sprit who dwells in you” (Rom. 8:11).
Grant Macaskill, Living in Union with Christ: Paul’s Gospel and Christian Moral Identity (Baker, 2019), 103.
The Christian life, therefore, has an element of the divine nature of the Son coming into human flesh and dwelling among us through our bodies. In this way, I believe we can view ourselves as teachers in a fundamental way as bringing Christ Jesus into the classroom with us simply because, if we are truly in Christ, his presence dwells within. To put it another way, we become his hands and feet within the classroom.
Apart from simply being Christians in the classroom, I think that as teachers we have a special way we can have an incarnational ministry in the classroom. As teachers, we are enabling our students to learn how to comprehend the truth. Whether it is opening the Bible, a great book, moments in history, mathematical formulas or grammatical terms, there are many truths that we handle in the classroom on a regular basis. We get to stand within a dynamic where we recognize how the Author of truth has made himself known through what he has revealed in the universe and in the scriptures. It is also the case that we have in our midst these young minds, specially made by God to be receptive to the revelation he his provided.
Obviously there is a role that the Spirit plays in the lives of our students. We cannot assume that by applying a method our students will become heartfelt believers singularly devoted to the Lord. However, in this incarnational role we have, I do believe that by being the hands and feet of Christ, the way we live out our faith bears much weight in the eyes of our students.
So, this Christmas as we celebrate the baby Jesus with lights, the decoration, the presents, the festivities, let us meditate on the importance of the incarnation. This miracle is central to God’s salvation plan. It also happens that we ourselves as teacher can follow in the footsteps of Jesus, the great teacher, to enable our students to follow Jesus more closely.
