May this meditation deepen your understanding of and joy in the Incarnation.

“All through the incarnate life and activity of the Lord Jesus we are shown that ‘all of grace’ does not mean ‘nothing of man’, but precisely the opposite: all of grace means all of man, for the fullness of grace creatively includes the fullness and completeness of our human response in the equation. But this is not something that can be understood logically, for logically ‘all of grace’ would mean ‘nothing of man’…All of grace means all of man! We must remember that in all his healing and saving relations with us Jesus Christ engaged in personalising and humanising (never depersonalising or dehumanising) activity, so that in all our relations with him we are made more truly and fully human in our personal response of faith than ever before. This takes place in us through the creative activity of the Holy Spirit as he unites us to the perfect humanity of the Lord Jesus conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary and raised again from the dead” (T.F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, xii).

photo is courtesy Desiring God

May the theology of the Incarnation sweeten your worship this Christmas season. The following paragraphs are from T.F. Torrance’s The Mediation of Christ.

Jesus Christ embodied in himself in a vicarious form the response of human beings to God, so that all their worship and prayer to God henceforth became grounded and centered in him. In short, Jesus Christ in his own self- oblation to the Father is our worship and prayer in an acutely personalized form, so that it is only through him and with him and in him that we may draw near to God with the hands of our faith filled with no other offering but that which he has made on our behalf and in our place once and for all.

In that perspective we must think of prayer as taking place within the relations of covenant partnership and reciprocity between God and mankind, but of Christian prayer as grounded in and governed by the fact that through his Incarnation Jesus Christ has stepped into that relationship as the Mediator, who not only brings God and man and man and God near to each other in propitiation but who in doing so stands in our place where we cry in prayer to God and makes himself our prayer, a prayer not in word or even in an act only but a prayer which he is in his own personal Being. Just as in Jesus Christ God addresses his word to us in such a way that he himself is wrapped up in his word in the form of personal being, so in Jesus Christ God has provided us with prayer that is identical with the personal self-offering and self-oblation of Jesus Christ to the Father on our behalf. It is as such that Jesus Christ stands in our place where we pray to the Father, so that from deep within our humanity, where he has united himself to us, and from out of it, assimilated to his own self-consecration to God, he prays: ‘Our father who art in heaven. Hallowed by thy Name. Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven . . .’ That is to say, where we are unable to pray to the Father as we ought or in any way worthy of him for all our prayers are unclean, Jesus Christ puts his prayer, prayed with us to the Father, into our unclean mouth that we may pray through him and with him and in him to the Father, and be received by the Father in him: ‘Thou art my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.’

We do not come before God, then, worshipping him and praying to him in our own name, or in our own significance, but in the name and significance of Jesus Christ alone, for worship and prayer are not ways in which we express ourselves but ways in which we hold up before the Father his beloved Son, take refuge in his atoning sacrifice, and make that our only plea.

‘Nothing in my hands I bring;
Simply to thy Cross I cling.’

In worship and prayer Jesus Christ acts in our place and on our behalf in both a representative and a substitutionary way so that what he does in our stead is nevertheless effected as our very own, issuing freely and spontaneously out of ourselves. Through his incarnational and atoning union Jesus Christ has united himself with us in such a reconciling and sanctifying way that he interpenetrates and gathers up all our faltering, unclean worship and prayer into himself, assimilates them to his one self-oblation to God, so that when he presents himself as the worship and prayer of all creation, our worship and prayer are presented there also. When the Father accepts us in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, who then can distinguish our worship and prayer from Jesus’ worship and prayer, for they are one and the same, wholly his and wholly ours in him?

Thus in all our worship and prayer, private and public, informal or formal, we come before God in such a way as to let Jesus Christ take our place, replacing our offering with his own self-offering, for he is the vicarious worship and prayer with which we respond to the love of the Father. We pray and worship in such a way as to make room in our prayer and worship for the living presence of Jesus as our Mediator in whom Offerer and Offering are one and the same, but in whom we are gathered up, with whom we are inseparably united, so that with him we pray and worship as we could not otherwise do.

At the end of the day when I kneel down and say my evening prayer, I know that no prayer of my own that I can offer to the heavenly Father is worthy of him or of power to avail with him, but all my prayer is made in the name of Jesus Christ alone as I rest in his vicarious prayer. It is then with utter peace and joy that I take into my mouth the Lord’s Prayer which I am invited to pray through Jesus Christ, with him and in him, to God the Father, for in that prayer my poor, faltering, sinful prayer is not allowed to fall to the ground but is gathered up and presented to the Father in holy and eternally prevailing form. At the same time, I recall that the Father has promised to send the Spirit of his Son, mediated through the name and vicarious humanity of Jesus, into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father; and I am assured that as I pray in the name of God’ s beloved Son I am caught up with all my own infirmities within the inarticulate intercession of the eternal Spirit of the Father and of the Son from whose love nothing in heaven or earth, nothing in this world or in the world to come, can ever separate us (T.F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, pp. 86-89).

One of the questions that my pastor, Mark Stuenzi, answered in his sermon this past Sunday morning on Luke 2 was “Why here?” Why was the firstborn of Mary born in a stable and placed in a manger? That question really doesn’t carry the heavy emotional baggage for us that it would have carried for Mary and Joseph. Here are Mary and Joseph traveling some 90 miles at the most inopportune time for expecting parents “due” to a decree issued by Caesar Augustus (Luke 2:1). One of the last things that any mother would wish to do, especially when she is anticipating the birth of her firstborn, would be to travel tens of miles over rough terrain when the time for her to give birth was too close for ease of mind and travel. It was most definitely not the ideal scenario for the birth of a child, let alone the birth of a firstborn who was to be given “the throne of his father David,” who would “reign over the house of Jacob forever,” and of whose “kingdom there would be no end” (Luke 1:32-33). In a world that boasted (as our world still does) in the births of the powerful and the noble (1 Corinthians 1:26), for a child destined for an eternal kingship to be born in circumstances like this was utter foolishness, drop-the-jaw folly. But such were the circumstances of the Holy One who was to be born to Mary.

Why was the Christ Child born into circumstances such as these (Why then?)? Why was the Holy One of God born in the most unsanitary place imaginable, namely, a manure filled and urine stained stable (Why there?)? Why would God ordain that the first breath of the infant Messiah’s lungs take in stench permeated air? Why then and why there?

On our way home after the sermon, I began to think of those questions in the context of the Hypostatic Union, that is, in the context of the union of the two natures (divine and human) of Christ in the one Person of Christ. I wondered if this great doctrine of the Hypostatic Union held any answers to our perplexing “why then” and “why there” questions. I am now convinced that it indeed does. It teaches that true and complete humanity came in union with true and complete deity in such a way that they can never be separated and yet never confused. “In this union God has become Man without ceasing to be God, and man is taken up into the very being of God without ceasing to be Man” (T.F. Torrance). This doctrine is a mystery that should give our little minds unending opportunities to worship the Christ who came to seek and to save that which was lost.

But how does this awesome doctrine help us answer our questions? With regard to the Hypostatic Union, Gregory Nazianzus (early church father) wrote, “That which is not taken up (assumed) is not healed.” Cyril of Alexandria wrote, “The thing not taken up is not saved.” One of the questions I ask the seniors who are taking their senior oral examination with me is, “Did Christ take up our pre-fall or post-fall humanity?” Every senior thus far has answered, “Our pre-fall humanity.” Their reasoning is that because Jesus did not have a sin nature he could not take up our post-fall humanity. I always first applaud their zeal for the sinlessness of Christ, but then ask this follow-up question, “Did the pre-fall humanity of Adam and Eve need to be redeemed?” To which they have all answered, “No.” “So what needed to be redeemed?” They answer, “The post-fall humanity of Adam and Eve.”
The saving significance of the Hypostatic Union is that Jesus took up our post-fall humanity yet without sin. Jesus actually assumed our brokenness and misery in the incarnation. He did not assume our humanity as it existed before sin. No, he took up all of our humanity that needed to be healed and saved. Jesus assumed the entirety of the flesh of fallen humanity apart from sin. Why? Because the unassumed is unhealed!

How does this aspect of the great doctrine of the Hypostatic Union help us answer our “why then” and “why there” questions? By giving us a tangible and real demonstration that would aid our understanding of what the Messiah came to do, namely, take up the entirety of our post-fall humanity apart from sin including the worst of our human misery and brokenness. He was born in a manure-filled and urine-stained stable, the most unsanitary place imaginable, so that he might save us from the dung of our human misery. His infant lungs took in stench-permeated air that he might rescue us from the reek of our human brokenness.

So feel free this Christmas season to breathe in the stench and reek of the Christmas story for God’s glory and your salvivic joy. Hallelujah, what a Savior!