Jesus is the fullness of God on stage. He is what John Donne called “Immensity cloistered in a womb.” Just when we thought the Lord God would sue for divorce, after a thousand years of our adulteries, the Lord God sends Jesus. In a world of no-fault divorce, this is astonishing grace. It was the most dramatic of moments. Angels gasped. This is what Tolkien calls the eucatastrophe, the astounding and unforeseen good happening that rescues billions of people. It is the polar opposite of a catastrophe.
The Lord God—the Lord of Exodus 34 and the servant of Isaiah 53-becomes the true Israelite, the baby boy of an unmarried teenager in Bethlehem. It was scandalous then and still is. The Old Testament anticipated a Messiah, but Jesus exceeded all prophecies and transformed all hopes. This was the steadfast love of the Lord, pouring himself out through Jesus. This was the Lord God of Exodus 34, compassionate for a thousand generations, in a teenager’s womb.
So why is the conception of a boy in Mary’s womb impossible to believe now? Why is it so strange that God is inside us? We are God’s friends-he is our Creator. God is not a stranger, an alien who has no kinship with us. The Lord God, our Creator and Liberator has been initiating renewal in his relationship with human kind since before he talked to Abraham, resided in Israel’s tabernacle and Temple, spoke to Moses at Sinai in blinding holiness and led Israel through the wilderness. So the action of God to conceive the life of Jesus in Mary’s womb is not out of character. Jesus is God’s most outrageous initiative, but not the first or the last.
Early on in Jesus’ ministry he tells Nicodemus he must be born again. He is declaring to Nicodemus that the Spirit and the Word of God must penetrates our hearts and conceive new life inside our bodies. This new birth happens to everyone whom the Lord God calls to himself. For two thousand years the Spirit has literally entered into billions of human bodies to regenerate them. Because we were dead in our sins it was absolutely necessary that this happen. As the Spirit conceives new life in us so did the Spirit conceive Jesus in Mary’s womb. Even now God’s Spirit lives in us, giving life and hope to us every bit as real as the life and hope he gave to Mary, the Mother of Jesus.