Afterwords -- the grand miracle
"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)
December 1, 2023
Dear friends,
In 1945 C. S. Lewis gave a talk in London, entitled "The Grand Miracle," which was later published in a collection of essays, God in the Dock (Eerdmans, 1970). Lewis was addressing the issue of skeptics who demythologized the accounts of Jesus' miracles as found in the gospels. His point was that the individual miracles reported in the gospels were merely glimpses within the larger supernatural framework of Jesus' life and ministry. Lewis maintained that the Incarnation (along with the Resurrection) was "The Grand Miracle", and if true, then all the other intervening miracles are certainly credible in light of Christ's overarching work of redemption. Both in the smaller miracles and the greater -- and in his natures both human and divine -- Christ's person and life is one integrated, supernatural, miraculous whole.
AT CHRISTMAS we celebrate God the Son becoming human. Somehow, the second Person of the Trinity descended into this creation and was born in a stable in Bethlehem. I say, somehow, because Christians have debated down through the ages just how an eternal, infinite, unchanging Creator could become time-bound, limited, and subject to suffering. Christians believe that God the Son joined his deity to our humanity, without giving up either nature. He's not half-man and half-god (a demigod), nor is he partly, sort-of God. He didn't work his way up to Godhood, rather, he came fully God and was born fully human. One Person with two natures.
THE GREAT DESCENT. From the Apostle Paul we get a sense of the great distance that our Lord traversed:
"...though he was in the form of God, [Christ] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." (Philippians 2:5-8)
From the very form and essence of Godhood he descends to take up a human nature, and the role of a servant, and humble obedience, all the way to his excruciating death. It's a long, long way from eternal glory to a human grave. Here's how Lewis describes the descent...
"The story of the Incarnation is the story of a descent and resurrection. When I say 'resurrection' here, I am not referring simply to the first few hours, or the first few weeks of the Resurrection. I am talking of this whole, huge pattern of descent, down, down, and then up again. What we ordinarily call the Resurrection being just, so to speak, the point at which it turns. Think what that descent is. The coming down, not only into humanity, but into those nine months which precede human birth, ...and going lower still into being a corpse, a thing which, if this ascending movement had not begun, would presently have passed out of the organic altogether, and have gone back into the inorganic, as all corpses do.
"One has the picture of a diver, stripping off garment after garment, making himself naked, then flashing for a moment in the air, and then down through the green, and warm, and sunlit water into the pitch black, cold, freezing water, down into the mud and slime, then up again, his lungs almost bursting, back again to the green and warm and sunlit water, and then at last out into the sunshine, holding in his hand the dripping thing he went down to get. This thing is human nature; but, associated with it, all nature, the new universe."
"I believe that God really has dived down into the bottom of creation, and has come up bringing the whole redeemed nature on His shoulders."
(C. S. Lewis, "The Grand Miracle," from God in the Dock)
THE GRAND MIRACLE. Christ descended into this cold, dark, chaotic world to rescue and restore his creation. He descends as the human and divine Representative, to become our Redeemer, bearing us upon his shoulders in his ascent. There is so much to ponder here, and so much to wonder at! He came down, and down, and then he goes up, and up, bringing us up with him.
Have you thought about this, just how far he came down for you? And how far he raised you up?
ARTICLES.
-- "Because eternity / was closeted in time / He is my open door / to forever." (Luci Shaw) Read her poem, "Made flesh," here.
-- "The truth of Christ reverberates through the web of human language because the Son is the womb of human language." (Pierce Taylor Hibbs) (Hibbs can be a bit obscure in places, but he's really thought about God's gift of language.)
-- Carl Trueman on "Why Ayaan Hirsi Ali Became a Christian."
-- "Not only did the earliest Christians care about books, and the careful copying of such books, but the nomina sacra demonstrate that they had a rather developed scribal infrastructure to make that happen." (Michael Kruger)
-- Did you know that cats have nearly 300 different facial expressions?
LISTENING TO...
-- A Holiday Harmony of two songs by The Hound + The Fox.
-- We enjoyed watching the service with Alistair and Susan Begg, celebrating 40 years of their ministry at Parkside.
-- Here's an instrumental medley of Beatles songs, performed by Nathaniel Murphy on a 1968 Rosewood Fender Telecaster.
WRITING WITH...
This week, I'm journaling with a vintage fountain pen, an Eversharp Symphony model #705 [photo at bottom], aka the "Golden Symphony", manufactured by the Wahl-Eversharp company, 1949-50. The unique "slipper-shaped" cap was designed by Raymond Loewy, a French-born industrial designer. More on that here.
FINAL QUOTE.
“Once in our world, a stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world.” (C. S. Lewis)
That's it for this week!
Sandy
Image credit. Photo above of orbital sunrise over the Pacific, courtesy NASA. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from The ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
