The Incarnation
“The Incarnation” is a rather innocuous song in Sufjan’s Christmas catalog. It’s a short instrumental piece that feels more like an interlude than an independent track. This is why I find it so audacious that Sufjan decided to name this particular song after one of the most loaded theological concepts in the Christian religion.
The song itself gives me a mystical and perplexing feeling; it makes me think of an encounter with the divine. My theory is that the music is meant to capture the moment when Mary, the Mother of God, was met by the angel Gabriel who said:
Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.
The young Mary would become a symbol of hope and inspiration for many, and her son, as Gabriel said, would be called “Son of the Highest,” or “Son of God.”
Christianity is so ubiquitous that I think we often overlook how strange of a religion it is. I once heard Christianity described as a middle ground between polytheism and monotheism and, while it isn’t completely accurate, I think it articulates what makes Christianity unique from other religions.
While Christians aren’t unique in their belief that God conceived a son (see Hercules and Thor, among others), Christianity is unique in its emphasis that Jesus Christ is not just the Son of God but that he’s co-equal with God. In other words, Christ is somehow both God and a human being. This view, sometimes known as the Trinity, has put Christianity in a sometimes-precarious position. Christians who overemphasized Christ’s humanness over his divinity have been burned at the stake as heretics. One example is a 16th-century preacher named Michael Servetus who called Jesus “the Son of the Eternal God” instead of “the Eternal Son of God.” A minor distinction, but for Servetus, a deadly one.
When I was younger, I recall being confused as to why Christians would defend this trinitarian distinction so vigorously. It was much simpler, in my view, to adopt one position or the other, either accept Jesus as some sort of demi-god or embrace a kind of monotheism in which Christ is the one true God.
Now that I’m older, though, I can understand what is lost if one abandons trinitarianism and embraces a more traditional monotheism. What makes Christianity appealing as a religion is that God became human and embraced all of the joy, pain, and idiosyncrasies of human existence. If Jesus was fully human, and more a prophet than a God, then God-itself never experienced human life. God would remain a distant and remote creature with no authentic connections to human beings. But, if Jesus came to Earth as a God, or rather, if Jesus wasn’t a human being, then he can’t claim to have actually experienced these things as a human. There is a sharp difference between knowing, in theory, about suffering, love, joy, laughter, sadness, and drunkenness and actually experiencing these feelings.
This is why, for Christians, it is essential that Jesus Christ is both a human being and God. God was not content to govern from on high, casting down his edicts to be delivered by drug-addled prophets. People are drawn to Christianity because Christianity has a face. A human representative. Someone who laughed and wept. Someone who got drunk at parties and weddings. Someone who felt the joy of friendship and also the agonizing pangs of betrayal. We can empathize with Jesus, we can understand Jesus and, if we had been there, perhaps we could have even wrapped our arms around him.
My favorite depiction of Jesus is often called The Good Shepherd, though it doesn’t have a name. It was painted sometime between the 2nd and 3rd century in the Catacombs of St Callixtus in Rome.
Here, Jesus is not depicted as the long-haired, bearded sage that we’re used to; that tradition came later. Instead, he looks like a young boy. He has one sheep over his shoulders and two more on either side of him. The way he holds the pot in front of him makes it look as though he’s leading you somewhere. Perhaps, you are even meant to be one of the sheep, maybe you are one of the hesitant ones who needs to be nudged along and encouraged.
Some scholars think this may have been inspired by the Greek god Hermes, who was often depicted as a shepherd leading people from this life into the next one. It could be that Jesus is meant to be leading us to heaven in this painting, but I’d like to think he could just be asking us to walk with him for awhile.
I don’t like most depictions of Jesus. His face is almost always shown as stoic and emotionless, and he is often depicted as a glorious and powerful being, devoid of human qualities. But here, Jesus looks ordinary. In fact, you almost certainly wouldn’t know it was him without context. If this is what Jesus looked like, he could disappear easily in a crowd.
I am not religious but, sometimes, when I look at this depiction, I think that I could be. The ordinariness of Jesus in this depiction is a profound statement of Christian theology. God is, in this image, indistinguishable from an ordinary human. It’s not hard to understand why this religion has captivated so many people.
Christmas is a celebration of the Nativity (once called “The Feast of the Nativity”) or, in other words, it’s a celebration of the birth of Christ. Some have said that it is really a celebration of the Incarnation. It is a celebration that the God of the universe is not the dictator that we so often believe him to be, nor is he the tax collector who demands a fraction of your wealth every paycheck. Instead, he’s a young shepherd boy who simply wants you to walk with him awhile.
Kevin Johnson is a Physics Teacher from New Jersey. In his free time, he reads and writes about religion, politics, history, and whatever else is interesting in the moment. Currently, he’s on the verge of releasing the first episodes of a podcast about failed US presidential campaigns, which can be found at @thealmostpresidentspodcast on Instagram.