The Hopes and Fears of All the Years: Day 24

The Fullness of Time Had Come

The Risk of Birth by Madeleine L’Engle
This is no time for a child to be born,
With the earth betrayed by war & hate
And a comet slashing the sky to warn
That time runs out & the sun burns late.
That was no time for a child to be born,
In a land in the crushing grip of Rome;
Honor & truth were trampled to scorn—
Yet here did the Savior make His home.
When is the time for love to be born?
The inn is full on the planet earth,
And by a comet the sky is torn—
Yet Love still takes the risk of birth.

Text: Galatians 4:4-5

Paul is the first written witness we have to the life of Jesus. That is a fact that often surprises many readers of Scripture. The assumption is that, since the Gospels are first in the order of the New Testament and they also narrate some of the events/sayings/actions of Jesus, the four Gospels must have been written first. That is not the reality of our sources. Mark was the first Gospel to be written, sometime around the year 70 CE, or roughly four decades after the life of Jesus. Paul wrote his authentic letters that we have between the late 40s and early 60s CE, or roughly twenty to thirty years after Jesus’s life.

I bring all this up because our earliest source, Paul, doesn’t seem to focus on the birth of Jesus as a miraculous event, like the Gospels of Matthew and Luke several decades later. Instead, Paul says only a few things about Jesus’s origins:

1. Jesus was born of a woman. (Galatians 4:4)

2. Jesus was born under the Law (Galatians 4:4)

3. Jesus was a descendant of David (Romans 1:3)

Nothing spectacular, really. If you boil it down, the totality of Paul’s claims about Jesus’s birth are that he was born like all humans are born, that he was Jewish, and that he descended from David’s family tree.

These are the earliest claims about Jesus’s origins…and I absolutely love it!

Jesus was not a superman invading earth from somewhere else, on a mission from God.

Jesus was one of us—human like us, born like us.

That means what he did, what he taught, and how he lived are not beyond our reach. The vision of the world that energized his work can also energize ours. The love that he embodied is also the same love we can embody.

If it means anything, the Incarnation means that God can best be known and experienced in the flesh, blood, bone, joy, grief, hope, and possibility of humanity. We truly bear God’s image.

The earliest “Christmas” message seems to have been that Jesus was one of us, and that we can be like him. Now that, my friends, is some good news!

Reflection:
If our earliest witness (Paul) emphasized Jesus’s shared humanity more than his miraculous origins, how does that reshape what it means to follow him—not just believe in him?

Where in your own flesh-and-blood life (your work, relationships, limits, griefs, or hopes) might God be known and experienced right now?

What changes if the “good news” of the Incarnation is less about Jesus being unlike us and more about how deeply he was connected to us and our experience?