Within the Jewish and Christian faiths, creation and redemption are intimately related. Creation is ultimately the product of the will of its Creator. Such a creation is cherished and sustained by God. God, who is omnipresent, is present through each part of creation from the intricacies of the atom to the vast movement of galaxies. Because God is present throughout creation, God co-experiences Her creation. Every tear ever shed, every hope ever risked, every breath ever taken, every pain ever suffered, every love ever offered—it has all been experienced by God and is all kept in the memory of God. For us transient creatures, time erases the past. But with God, who is eternal, transcendent, and immanent, nothing is lost. All is kept in God waiting to be set free and experience healing and joy. God deeply identifies with each part of Her creation. In ways the church rarely realizes, the gospel is “for God so loves the world (in Greek, cosmos)” of which we humans are only a part.
If God interpenetrates Her creation through the Spirit, then the concept of incarnation is not as foreign as one might first imagine. If God has always been active and present in Her creation, how is the incarnation found in Jesus different and unique? Once again, Elizabeth Johnson, in her wonderfully informative book entitled Creation and the Cross: The Mercy of God for a Planet in Peril, provides some insightful suggestions. (The quotes from her book in this article are in bold print with the appropriate page numbers.) Johnson writes, Incarnation bespeaks a different form of divine presence marked by an unimaginable intensity. It is presence in the flesh. The omnipresent God is now present in and as a living, breathing human being…With the incarnation God’s presence abides not only in and for the world but goes deep down to the point of identity as part of the world. An unimaginable act of loving solidarity, it enacts the divine love that not only blesses people benevolently but also enters empathetically into their own experience, self-identifying with the glory and agony of human life from within, befriending even the godless and the godforsaken. In Jesus Christ the unfathomable God has now joined the mess…In a particular way, incarnation places the crucified God on the side of the tortured and dispossessed, rather than in alliance with the powerful who crush the life out of others in myriad ways. The cross is where believers in Christ find their God, vulnerable to the brutality and power of the privileged. (pp,178-179)
Theologian Jeannine Hill Fletcher writes, “Even as his body is lifted in torture…, Christian faith is placed in the triumph over destruction that resurrection promises. The affirmation that God resides in Jesus is the affirmation that resident within the body broken and bloodied by the weight of the world, God abides with the tortured, and transforms death to new life.” (The Sin of White Supremacy: Christianity, Racism, and Religious Diversity in America, p. 135)
Paul in Philippians 2 uses the metaphor of God’s self-emptying to refer to incarnation. Matthew suggests Wisdom embodied in Jesus. John writes that the Word became flesh and pitched the divine tent in the midst of humanity. These and other writers in the early church are seeking ways to express what they had experienced in the Christ Event. They are trying to express the unimaginable, the ineffable, the “scandal of particularity” that the Creator of this vast universe should come in time and space in a Jewish peasant. His life, death, and resurrection were the “facts” which led them to this faith.
But, are there implications stemming from the incarnation in Jesus that are relevant to the wider world? To answer this question, some theologians refer to “deep incarnation.” John’s Gospel claims that “the Word became flesh.” John did not say the Word became human (anthropos in Greek). Neither did he say that the Word became a male human being (aner in Greek). He wrote that the Word became flesh (sarx in Greek and basar in Hebrew). These words refer to flesh that is physical and transient—flesh that is real and perishable. You will remember that the covenant God made after the flood included “all flesh”—all beings on this earth. The flesh God inhabited in Jesus of Nazareth included more than just human flesh. His body represented all flesh on this earth. Today we are aware of how similar we are to all creatures on the planet. Indeed, we are made up of particles and chemicals from the universe. The carbon in our bodies is stardust. Much of our bodies is composed of water (H2O). The air we breathe gives us the oxygen we need to stay alive. We are made of the elements of previous eons stretching back billions of years. Johnson writes, We can no longer define human identity without including the great sweep of cosmic development and our shared biological ancestry with all organisms in the community of life. We evolved relationally; we exist symbiotically; our existence depends on interaction with the rest of the natural world. Relocating anthropology in this broader context provides the condition to rethink the scope and significance of the incarnation in an ecological direction…Like a pebble thrown into a pond, the incarnation ripples outward with saving ramifications for all flesh, including flesh that is other than human. (p. 184)
Danish theologian Niels Gregersen coined the phrase “deep incarnation” to capture this broader meaning of incarnation. He writes, ‘in Christ, God enters into the biological tissue of creation in order to share the fate of biological existence. In the incarnate One, God shares the life conditions of foxes and sparrows, grass and trees, soil and moisture.” (Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology, p. 18) The saving God became a human being, who was part of the wider human community, which shares the membrane of life with other creatures, all made from cosmic material, and vulnerable to death and disintegration. (p.185) Johnson points out that the church has always understood that the flesh of Jesus in the incarnation connects with the flesh of all human beings. Deep incarnation says that that flesh connects with the whole matrix of the material universe. As a densely specific expression of the love of God already poured out in creation, the incarnation brings God near in a different way to the whole of earthly reality in its corporal and material dimensions—all of earth’s ecosystems, plants, and animals, and the cosmos in which planet earth dynamically exists. (p. 187)
Let’s go a little deeper into what all this means in reference to the Christ Event and especially the cross and resurrection. The cross is a mysterious and profound sign that God enters into the darkest trials of human suffering, death, and near despair. In solidarity with the human race, Jesus crucified and risen abides in intimate contact with all people who walk through the valley of the shadow of death… Deep incarnation would seem to imply that God-in-Christ is with all flesh that suffers and dies, not just human beings. (pp. 187-188) The whole process of evolution which allows for new life is also a costly event. Whole species must become extinct for new species to arise and thrive. Our very transience implies vulnerability, suffering, and death. Pain and death are woven into the very fabric of life’s evolutionary history on earth… Nature is cruciform…It is as if by inhabiting the inside of the isolating shell of death, Christ crucified brings divine life into closest contact with disaster, setting up a gleam of light for all other creatures who suffer in that same annihilating darkness. In their suffering and dying, they are never left alone. (p.188) Gregersen writes, “Understood in this way, the death of Christ becomes an icon of God’s redemptive co-suffering with all sentient life as well as the victims of social competition.” Seen through the lens of deep incarnation, Calvary graphically shows that the God of suffering love abides in solidarity with all creatures, bearing the cost of new life through endless millennia of evolution, from the extinction of whole species to, yes, every sparrow that falls to the ground…The indwelling Spirit of God, the Spirit of the crucified Christ, does not abandon them in the moment of trial but companions them into death. Theologically speaking, the cross signals that God is present in the midst of anguish, bearing every creature and all creation forward with an unimaginable promise. This does not solve the problem of suffering in a neat systematic way. It does make a supreme difference in what might come next. (pp. 189-190)
The Easter narratives witness that the crucified Jesus did not die into nothingness but into the embrace of the ineffable God who gives life, the first fruits of all the human dead. His destiny means that our hope does not merely clutch at a possibility, but stands on the irrevocable ground of what has already transpired in him…As the first fruits of an abundant harvest, the risen Jesus Christ pledges a future for all the dead, not only the dead of the human species but of all species. In Jesus crucified and risen, God who graciously gives life to the dead and brings into being the things that do not exist will redeem the whole cosmos. As Ambrose of Milan in the fourth century preaches, “In Christ’s resurrection the earth itself arose”…Risen from the dead, Jesus has been reborn as a child of the earth, radiantly transfigures. Karl Rahner’s dramatic words spell out the dynamism of the result: “His resurrection is like the first eruption of a volcano which shows that in the interior of the world God’s fire is already burning, and will bring everything to blessed ardor in its light. He has risen to show that this has already begun.” (pp. 190-191)
As we bring this series to a close, you may be wondering if we have strayed from our original topic of Paul and the Gospel. I would suggest that we have simply begun to plumb the depths of Paul’s understanding of God’s ultimate purpose: the reconciliation of all the universe to God and itself. Let us look at a few passages in Pauline literature to appreciate this movement: I Corinthians 15; Romans 8:18-39; Philippians 2:1-11; Colossians 1:15-20
Pope Francis in Laudato Si writes about how Christ, now risen from the dead, had taken unto himself this material world and is present to every creature “surrounding it with his affection. The very flowers of the field and the birds which human eyes contemplated and admired are now imbued with his radiant presence…At the end we will find ourselves face to face with the infinite beauty of God. Eternal life will be a shared experience of awe in which each creature, resplendently transfigured, will take its rightful place. All creation will share with us in unending plentitude.”
(RZ—The Eastern Orthodox Church has always focused on the cosmic healing and redemption of the universe. It understands and appreciates the reality of sin, but it never embraced Augustine’s concept of original sin. Instead, it focused on the good news of deliverance from death and corruption and had a positive gospel for all creatures.)
