My awakening to the wonder of the Christian message happened when I was seventeen and studying English for A Level. Part of the curriculum was the poetry of Browning, which I very much enjoyed. My teacher recommended reading G K Chesterton's book about Browning, and some ideas in that led me back to his poetry to see its meaning in a new light. I had reached a stage when the conservative Baptist version of Christianity I had grown up with and the sermons I heard every Sunday seemed not only boring but questionable as well – and we weren’t encouraged to ask questions that were too challenging. The literature I was reading in school was much more exciting. But after reading Chesterton's book I suddenly realised that Browning was a Christian. Some of his themes were a fresh and meaningful expression of the message of Christianity. This gave me freedom to think, and in a very short time I had become an enthusiastic Christian.

One of the first things that excited me was the idea of the incarnation. From Browning's and Chesterton's point of view, part of its meaning was that God the Creator wanted to complete his experience, so he came into the world in Jesus because he wanted to know what it was to be one of his own creatures. Somehow, the teaching I had heard in church had never clearly brought home to me the wonder of ‘the Word made flesh’. We were taught to reverence Jesus as a sort of supernatural being, not quite real as a man – a sort of half-god walking with his feet not quite touching the ground, doing miracles, and knowing everything while pretending not to. But God becoming a baby and growing up to be a real man – that was something new to me.

This revelation came to me just before Christmas. Our church was without a minister at the time and the young people had been asked to take the Christmas morning service. I was to be the speaker. I had done that kind of thing several times before and was quite capable of coming out with acceptable cliches, but this time was different. For the first time, I really, passionately meant what I was saying. The weather that Christmas was cold and fine, and it was a thrill to look up to the stars at night and think how, in Jesus, God who created them had looked up at them with human eyes. When I became a minister, the Incarnation was a central part of the faith I preached, and Christmas was always a magical time for that reason. In the words of Christina Rossetti’s beautiful carol:

‘Our God, heaven cannot hold him, nor earth sustain.

Heaven and earth shall flee away when he comes to reign.

In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed

the Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.’


Over the years I began to have questions about the incarnation as a literal truth. In what sense can we say ‘he came down to earth from heaven' if he was born in the way we all are? What does this really mean? Even the New Testament is not explicit and unanimous about it. Different writers express it in different ways. They talk of Jesus as ‘the Son of God’ more often than as ‘God’. Even the writer of John's Gospel says, ‘the Word was made flesh’, which, although he has already said ‘the Word was God’, is not quite as direct as saying ‘God became flesh’.

Now that we have a sense of the universe as vastly greater and older than we used to think, we are bound to question: why, or in what sense, did God come into the world as a human being just 2000 years ago? Did the relationship between God and humanity suddenly change at that comparatively late date in human history, not to mention the history of the planet? Hasn’t God always been ‘Immanuel’, God with us? Hasn’t God always been loving, caring and forgiving? I find a lot to think about in books like Diarmuid O’Murchu’s 'Ancestral Grace'. Surely God was working in and with human beings from their very first origins, and with other animals too, and indeed all living things, even all created things. Is not the universe itself the incarnation of God? 

This understanding of the incarnation does not take away the sense of wonder – it even enhances it. The real magic of Christmas is surely that it focuses on a newborn baby, reminding us that every time a baby is born, even in the poorest circumstances, God has become incarnate again and a new hope has come into the world.


Nor is this universal incarnation absent from the New Testament. The teaching there is that, as God was in Christ, so God is in those who believe. Paul often talks of us being ‘in Christ’ and the church being his ‘body’. The resurrection means that the Jesus who died is still alive in his disciples – indeed of all who share his nature and do what he would do, whether they know it or not. In the familiar words attributed to St Teresa of Avila:

‘Christ has no body but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes with which He looks with compassion on this world, yours are the feet with which He walks to do good, yours are the hands, with which He blesses all the world…’

It is in ordinary human beings that God is present and active in the world today. The incarnation is a permanent reality. Jesus is not a being different from other human beings. He is fully man and fully God, the most complete and human being we have seen in this world, the one who most surely shows us the nature of God, both in his character and in the story of his life. But we are all part of that incarnation.