The glory of the flesh
About 2,700 years ago, the first Isaiah, an outstanding poet, wrote: For a child is born to us, a son is given to us; upon his shoulder dominion rests. They name him Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero, Father-Forever, Prince of Peace (Is 9, 5).
Seven centuries later, around 80 AD, a physician evangelist called Luke, another poet, described: Some shepherds were keeping the night watch over their flock. An angel appeared to them and said to them, “I proclaim to you good news of great joy. A saviour has been born for you. So they went in haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the infant lying in the manger (Lk 2, 8-16).
Around a decade afterwards, a mystic theologian, author of the fourth Gospel whose historic identity remains unknown, but who is definitely not John the apostle, in the foreword to his gospel stated: The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us (Jn 1, 14).
Is there another way to say more with fewer words and more beautifully? Utopic horizon, political critique, human sensitivity, mystical depth, symbolic creation… I cannot but be amazed, and I should just listen, be quiet, watch… and let my heart expand and my shaky knees become firm. But allow me to return to those Christmas words from these thresholds of light.
A child is born to us, says Isaiah to “a nation walking in darkness”, like so many peoples do today. He celebrates the birth of no child but the enthroning of a new king, Hezekiah, described as the son of God endowed with divine attributes. But it is a prophetic irony. The prophet, learning through history, knew that no king would be a saviour and, therefore, divine. He seems to praise the king, but actually he denounces him, because he looks into the future to a liberator who will not be born from David’s dynasty or from any other royal dynasty. Will that be posible? The patient perseverance of the people, the peaceful fight for justice, the creative goodness, the Breath that inhabits us will make it posible, if we let it breathe into us.
Do not be afraid. I proclaim to you good news of great joy, writes Luke. A few poor shepherds –unlearned and impure because of their trade-, angels, singing to them, announce in the darkness of the night: A Saviour has been born for you. Mary, Joseph and a child in a manger. No kings, no palaces, no priests, no temples. A child in a manger. An upside-down world. Solidary poverty, the power of affection, lowly born humanity, the recovered joy of living, peace and relief. Behold the divine, the glory of God. Maximum irony and the best news in the language of a story for children, for the unsophisticated heart.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us declares the foreword of the fourth gospel. The prophet’s rebellious oracle and the evangelist’s imagined description give way to the symbolic flight of the mystic theologian. But the flight is not abstracted from the earth and from the specific. The Word –the biblical Wisdom, the Greek Logos, the universal Soul– inhabits the heart of the world, of the animated matter of all beings. And the Word, it concludes, became glorious and wounded flesh in the life of Jesus, full of freedom and compassion. From his life we receive grace after grace, and it sums up the truth of everything.
All which can and cannot be said –the Mystery of Christmas, the Mystery of Jesus, is the Mystery of life and of all living beings- was said as a prophecy, a myth and symbol, and it was not posible to say it any better. But there were doctors and bishops who wanted to say it better, and made it into a doctrine and in the IV century they defined the Incarnation dogma: “The only and eternal Son of God, without leaving his divine nature and personality in Jesus, born from a virgin mother, assumed the human nature (not the human personality) to save us from our original and personal sins, through dying in the cross”. And they taught that God, from eternity and in all past and future times, was only incarnated once, 2000 years ago, in the planet Earth, in the species Homo sapiens, in a Jewish man from Galilee called Jesus.
That and other dogmas have no meaning for us today, keeping us away from the Earth and from the breath that moves it, and from life which is the only revealed and infallible truth. We must undo that way up to the life which gave rise to those dogmas. All words were born from Life to take us to it, to become flesh, to give us life and, once renewed, to re-sprout life again. Let’s, then, undo that way, let’s just go back to the creative hope of Isaiah’s oracle, to the unsurpassed tenderness and beauty of Luke’s story, to the open, unsophisticated and full symbols of the fourth gospel: word, flesh, home.
Let’s free the dogma from its bolts. Let’s those of us who still recognize us in Jesus, the son of Mary and Joseph, re-trace back the dogma to the Source -with no beginning or end- of Incarnation. Incarnation is open and unfinished, universal and never-ending. Incarnation did not occur just once, or once and for all. Incarnation is not closed or finished.
The Word, or Energy, or Spirit, or God inhabits, animates and unifies the heart of the Universe. It express itself in the wave and the particle, in a stone, the plant and the animal. It becomes living, sentient, inteligent flesh. It speaks, answers, loves in different ways in all changing shapes that were, are, and will be. It became and will continue becoming flesh in all human species that existed in this planet and in the post-human or trans-human species that will exist after Homo sapiens. Languages will pass, religions will pass, Churches will pass and so will Christianity with all its dogmas, but Incarnation –whatever its name may be- will continue.
Today, in this Christmas season and on every day, I contemplate the Soul and Glory of life in the living flesh of Jesus and, in all my poverty, I, too, want to incarnate it.
Aizarna, December 20th, 2020
Translated by Mertxe de Renobales Scheifler