From My Upcoming Book: The Spirit & Incarnation

           For Christians, there is probably no more recognizable and moving story in all the Bible than the Birth Narrative of Jesus. It is a very powerful piece of story telling. There should be no need to recount it here, rather I want to accentuate the way it points to so much of what I've said about the nature of Jesus and His relationship with God before. You have this sense of cosmic events taking place, with visions, and signs, and events that are painted as matching up to Old Testament passages referring to Messiah. And yet this cosmic dimension is seen as taking place in, through, and under the mundane, the everyday, and the insigificant. Joseph and Mary are no leaders, nothing special. They are poor, downtrodden Jews, an oppressed class within an oppressed people. That classic image of the Baby in the manger, surrounded by angels and kings, could not capture the reality of Christ better: God, the Cosmic God of the Old Testament, identifies with the weakest, and the lowest. I agree with many Biblical scholars who believe much of this is mythologized. I doubt, for instance, that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. The prophecy that is taken as the reason for Him being born there (Matthew 2:5-6) is taken from Micah 5:2. But that passage refers not to a place, but to a king or a clan. In Israel there was a PLACE called Bethlehem, a CLAN called Bethlehem and there was at one time a KING called Bethlehem. The wording of Micah indicates a person or group of people is being referred to, not a place. Matthew mistranslates the passage and so posits Jesus' birth in Bethlehem to fulfill what he thinks the prophecy really was.

            To focus on these details, however, is to miss the point. Matthew was not lying when he said Jesus was born in Behtlehem, he was reasoning from what he thought he already knew. He was animated by an absolute conviction that in Jesus the Christ had come. He thought the Christ was supposed to come from Bethlehem, so he conjectured a reason why Jesus would've been born there, THAT Jesus was born there was, for Matthew and Luke, a given, as was Jesus' status as Messiah. It is that conviction, that experience of the Divine in and through Jesus, that really matters. The imagery surrounding the birth serves to help us share in that experience of the Divine in the 'nobody', in the ordinary, everyday person. And grasping that fact, grasping Jesus as a revelation of the self-emptying God, is absolutely essential, or so I've argued elsewhere (CONVERSATIONAL look up).

            Interesting for our purposes here is the role the Spirit plays in the Birth Narratives. In Matthew 1, we are told that Mary is pregnant "by" the Holy Spirit, and "through" the Holy Spirit (vs 18-20). In Luke the presence of the Spirit is more pronounced. This is not suprising. Luke-Acts is generally thought to be one complete book, written by one author. And Acts is the most important book on the Holy Spirit in the Bible, as we'll see in the next chapter. Nowhere is the Holy Spirit mentioned more. It makes sense, then, that the Spirit would play a large role in the Birth of Jesus in Luke. In Luke the Spirit fills up John the Baptist, who will baptize Jesus affirming His ministry and establishing Him as Messiah. The Spirit moves the parents of John to prophecy messages relevant to Jesus before He is born (Luke 1:40-45). She prepares the hearts of some to see the Messiah before their deaths, and by Her they recongize that Messianic promise fulfilled in a young Jesus (Luke 2:22-40). Most importantly, in my eyes, is the word used to describe conception 'by the Spirit'. In Luke, Mary is told that the Spirit will 'overshadow' her (Luke 1:35), rather than that she will be made pregnant 'through' The Spirit. This is very important, the original Greek word used for 'overshadow' meant something like: "a power so great it replaces you". Whether deliberately or accidentally, I think the writer of Luke said something very important on that occasion, an issue I'll return to in a moment.

            The Gospel of Mark conspicuously lacks a Birth Narrative. Being the oldest and most Jewish of the Gospels, I suspect that Mark is an adoptionist text. I think the writer of Mark believed that Jesus divinity and/or place as savior began at baptism. This was a widely held position among some early Christians, especially those who were very Judaistic in their beliefs and worship style, and Mark reflects it. But here, too, the Spirit is involved in Jesus' divinization. For we are told that at His baptism the sign of His being chosen, adopted or 'divinized' (made one with God) is the a Holy Spirit, embodied or expressed in the form of a Dove (Mark 1:10). This narrative must have been widely known among Christians, because even Matthew and Luke include the story in their account, even though the scene seems strange when placed in the context of what they have come before. Only John has Christ come without the Spirit's help. By having Christ as the Word of God just 'become incarnate' on His own (John 1:14), John has given Christ a primary role in the Incarnation, made a clear distinction between the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and reinforces his later contention that Jesus Christ comes before the Spirit. The final text important for us here is Luke 4:14-21, where Jesus appropriates for Himself Isaiah 61:1-3, which I talked about in the last chapter. In Jesus' reading of that text, He claims the authority and power of the Messiah. For Jesus that authority and power comes, as Isaiah says it does, from an 'anointing' by the Spirit. Jesus' reading implies that He will bring the freedom the Spirit promised in Isaiah, and He has been chosen to do so by that same Spirit. In this way, from Jesus' own mouth, we have a message that the Spirit is the Source of Jesus' power.

            There is so much that is important here, so much that reinforces what we've said about the Spirit already, and so much that when put into conversation with my model can hopefully reveal even more. Let me begin by saying that while I think the image of Jesus as the Source of the Spirit can be useful, and I will try to pull something useful from it later on, I have already set out an argument as to why we should look at the Spirit as an image that goes back to the Old Testament. I made that argument all the way back in Chapter 1. To the degree I hold to that argument, and it is one of the things I am most confident of in all I've said so far, I will obviously be inclined to agree with the writers here who see the Spirit as the Source of Christ and the Incarnation. Particularly interesting to me is the action of the Spirit in Luke. There the Spirit seems to be moving around, preparing the world for Christ's coming. The images of Simeon and Anna, who had been told to expect the Messiah, and of the Birth of John the Baptist, who would be possessed of the Spirit himself, speak to a sense that creation itself was being moved so that Jesus' birth would come about. This is exactly how I see Jesus' birth.

            The Spirit moves history, She guides history and invited the things of the world forward so they would bring about an image of "Creation Taken as a Whole" into human history. Let me explain what I mean by this statement: I want to emphasize here the difference between Jesus and the rest of us. I have elsewhere emphasized Jesus' ordinariness, and I think this is absolutely vital. You cannot understand Jesus' Divinity until you understand His "everydayness", the two are intertwined. But here I want to make clear that I do not think that Jesus is in all ways the same as anyone else. For one thing, no one of is in all ways the same as everyone else. One of the consequences of Whiteheadian thought is that individuality is real. Each is a unique expression of the whole, a truly unique expression. All humans share almost identical genes, but they do not share completely identical genes. Everyone is to some degree gentically unique, and whats more, they are unique in the sense of the ways their genes interact with their environment. Epigenetics is the study of how environmental changes turn genes on and off. Every creature is a part of their ecosystem, and the ecosystem is a part of them. By turning genes on and off, differences in environment change things physically. Cutlural milieu, too, makes people unique. The way you are raised, the culture you are inculcated into, they change who you are. Finally, choice matters. That is a central conviction of my philosophy. Your choices change who you are, your choices matter. The point is, that an absolute 'sameness' among all people is an illusion. Life is wholeness, but not sameness. When William James, a philosopher who influenced Alfred N Whitehead, first encountered Darwin's theory of evolution, he was overjoyed, because it meant that each thing was truly unique. That idea should make the idea that Jesus was truly different from the rest of us, less of a difficult pill to swallow.

            But Jesus' uniqueness was not only a matter of individuality. I have said earlier that a thing is the relationships it has, that things are constituted by their relationships. Jesus' relationship with God was different from ours in an important way, and my ideas about the Spirit can help us understand this. I said earlier that the Spirit calls different people for different roles, and empowers those people in different ways. Jesus' role in the world was to reveal Christ in human history. Now, in one sense we are all called to reveal Christ in history, in that through our actions, when they are done correctly, we can reveal Christ. But that is not what I am talking about. I am saying that Jesus was called by the Spirit to live as a vision of the whole of the world, that Jesus was called, and born, to reveal to us the dynamic I spoke about earlier. Let me try to clarify this distinction: I can be called to sell shoes, and in the way I sell shoes I can reveal the Suffering Love that is the Character of Creation. But Jesus just was called to reveal the Suffering love that would be revealed in my proper living out of my own role. Jesus was called to be a vision of the whole of creation. We are all called to act on behalf of the whole of creation, but Jesus was called to show us what Creation IS, what Reality, taken as a whole, really IS. Jesus is the Character of the Universe revealed. Jesus IS the reality that I live into when I do as I'm called to do by the Spirit. Jesus is physical reality laid bare, that image is what I am responding to when I respond to the Character the Spirit presents to me. We are the particular expression of the Universal Whole, Jesus' is The Universal Whole in human form. He is not a particular expression of the whole, the whole expressing itself in a unique way, but the individual, the particular, expressing the whole.

            All the Spirit did in relation to Jesus: all Jesus was called to, all Jesus was empowered for, was about showing what the Character of the Universe IS. Where I am called to live that Character out in various roles, Jesus ONLY role was to show me what I am living out in my various roles. Revealing Divinity was a role Jesus was given, and Divinity was the power He was given to fulfill that role. The paradox is that in order to fulfill that role, in order to reveal Christ, Jesus had to be kept from having a full understanding of His Divinity. The Christ I spoke about earlier is totally self-emptying, claiming nothing for itself but giving all to created things and to The Father. Such a self-emptying reality could only be revealed in a being that claimed no divinity for itself. All people, all the time, fall into the trap of making themselves god, of claiming for themselves divinity. We do this in so many ways, all the time. That tendency had to be totally stamped down, had to be crushed, in order for one us to express what God really is. Jesus had to be the one who knew Himself to be least like God, in order to be God at all. That is why Jesus' ordinariness is as important as His uniqueness.

            And this couldn't happen by the Spirit's actions upon one person alone. The Spirt, remember, can only work with what the facts on the ground already ARE. So the things of the universe had to be guided forward over a long period of time, with countless setbacks and down turns, in order to finally bring about the Image the Spirit wanted in the world. On this model, the Spirit guides history forward, moving it toward many destinies, but one in particular: Jesus Christ Himself. All biological evolution is a meandering towards Jesus Christ. Jesus is the very end of the evolutionary process. There is a randomness to evolution, because the things of the world remain free to reject the Spirit's call, or to take their time responding to Her. The Spirit presented new possibilities for created things countless times until humanity finally came into being. And then began the long cultural evolutionary march. There had to be a messianic vision that developed, someone had to come up with something like the Suffering Servant idea, the Hebrew people had to deal with their place in the world, and on and on. The Spirit needed all these tumblers to fall into place before the key could be turned, and She couldn't drop them Herself. And then, finally, at the right time, in the right place, the last tumblers were in place, and she empowered two 'nobodies' to produce the End (as in the 'Telos') of all Creation.

            The image of Mary being 'overshadowed' is very interesting. What I'm about to say may be an imaginative re-interpretation but I think its an important one: in the moment of Jesus' conception and for who knows how long, Mary became a perfect expression of the Spirit's reality. Mary became a living sacrament, and 'in through and under' her and the events surrounding His conception, whatever they may have been, the Reality of the Spirit became revealed as Jesus reveals the reality of Christ. Mary can be a wonderful image for the Holy Spirit, and while this is not the way Catholics understand the veneration of Mary, for us it can serve that vital purpose. In Mary we can see a glimpse, if only for a moment, of the Holy Spirit in human form. That it was the Book of Luke, written by a woman, that made this image possible, lends some credence to my move here. Though even if it be my own projection, I think its a valid one. Either way, the image of Mary's free and enthusiastic acceptance of the call of God in the form of the Spirit is in keeping with all I've said about the nature of the Spirit.

            Jesus, too, in my view had the freedom to reject God's call. Jesus was born with the power and call to Divinity, but it wasn't something He had to hold onto. He could've chosen to throw off the cross not only that Christ bears but that Christ IS. Divinity was with Him from the beginning, but He was given opportunities to leave it behind and become something less. His role could have been changed, as could His relationship to God. The Baptism and temptations can be seen as just such opportunities, as can Jesus' claim of the Spirit's anointing. In many ways I think the cross the world laid on Him was an attempt to get Jesus to give up Divinity, though that is not how He would've understood it. Had He given into the temptation to call for a military uprising, had He turned from His call to form a new moral community or accept suffering, in that sin we would've seen Christ leave Jesus, as Jesus' role changed. But fulfilling all God called Him to, not knowing what it all meant, not knowing if He was right on any level, He fulfilled the role the Spirit gave Him, and God could then appropriate Jesus' existence as His own.

            And what was the result of all this? What reality did Jesus embody? He embodied a life of pure self-giving, of redemption through suffering, death and resurrection. Jesus receives our sin and our suffering, and thereby overcomes them. In the same way God's call to Hosea was to embody His relationship with Israel by marrying an adulterous wife, an image of sharing in God's experience of suffering and rejection, so Jesus embodies Christ's relationship with the universe as a whole. It reveals a cruciform reality, God bearing us on His back. Through this man Jesus, the Disciples experienced the God of the Cosmos, and this led to the Chistocentric Creation Story spoken of earlier. Jesus is God as Suffering Love. He is that through the Spirit.

            The receptive image of God, the self-emptying image we see in Jesus, is not in line with our modern sensibilities. To help is to act, it is to exercise power and to DO something. Even ministry today is so much about talking, so few of us have any time to sit, to be aware of the moment, to really listen. More often than not, listening and not acting and talking is what is needed. Ministries of listening are sorely lacking. Listening is the power of love, it is the power of Christ. Christ is the ultimate 'listener', receiving all we have to give, even unto His suffering and Death. Christ's listening is receptive, and in that receptiveness it truly changes things. It is in part for this reason that I have so clearly defined that role in Christ's side of the Trinity.