Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! — Romans 7:25a
I’m thinking about the two sides of me. There is the person I am and then there is the person I want to be. Those two people seem always at war with each other inside my brain. On my good days, I somehow manage to act like the person I want to be, but let a little stress seep into my life or a conflict erupt, and this other person shows up wearing my skin. I default to a version of myself I don’t like, someone who poaches peace and breeds chaos. Psychologists might call that person my “false self” or my “shadow side.” Whatever the term, what a powerful self it is! Few things are more disappointing as finding out too late that I’ve given in to that “self” … again.
I suspect I’m not alone in this struggle. The apostle Paul speaks for all humanity when he writes to the Romans, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do … For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do — this I keep on doing.” (Romans 7:15-19, NIV).
We all know too well this cycle of frustration — of reaching for our better nature only to find ourselves discouraged by a repeat appearance of our baser side. Knowing what we know about ourselves, we ought to be all the more awe-struck by the glorious theology beneath the Bethlehem story.
What we celebrate at Christmas is the fact that God came to us in human form. Theologically, this invites us into an idea even deeper than the presenting scene of animals and hay-lined mangers. While the technical term — hypostatic union — wipes away the warmth of that pastoral picture, it calls us to consider the real gift of this cosmic reality. The incarnation is the melding of divinity with humanity. He who was fully God held together the power of his divinity with the experience of his humanity … perfectly. And because he did, he now has power enough to reconcile those two natures within any person.
When Jesus our Messiah entered into our world, he became the first of a new kind of person, one who identified completely with our limits without releasing his divine nature. His birth did not erase the fact that he is the Word who spoke all creation into existence in Genesis chapter 1. His death did not negate the fact that he is the Warrior who battled with death and won in Revelation chapter 19.
Fully God, fully man. If we slight him on the God side we slide into theological liberalism, focusing on his teachings and example without embracing his cosmic power. If we slight him on the human side, we’re in danger of unitarianism — unable to accept the unique nature of the Son or his humanity in the temptations, his frustration with fallenness, his suffering on the cross. But Jesus resisted sin, because he felt it. He loved his enemies as enemies because he sensed their opposition. He forgave people because he experienced the grief of their sins against God. He experienced life as a human, but perfectly. And because he has made perfect peace with these two parts of himself, he is able — this Spirit-Man — to offer us both pattern and permission to seek wholeness for our own broken lives. In fact, Jesus has accomplished in his body through the perfect union of divinity and humanity what we all long for most … peace.
In his letter to the Ephesian church, Paul speaks of Jesus as the answer to the “dividing wall of hostility” that exists between two kinds of people. He writes,
“For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its command and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility” (Ephesians 2:14-16).
Paul makes reference here to a spiritual barrier between two kinds of people, but it is no stretch to say that the walls between us are also walls within us. In fact, I suspect that dividing wall that builds inside fallen people creating chaos and dis-ease is the very one that creates the hostilities between us. We battle each other because we battle ourselves, and fear eggs us on. We long to be saved from the stress of unanswered questions and the pressure to be what we can never be, but we’re afraid of discovering we aren’t worthy of the salvation we’re offered. Meanwhile, we ignore the remarkable gift of incarnation. As the prophet Isaiah wrote:
… it was our weaknesses he carried; it was our sorrows that weighed him down. And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God, a punishment for his own sins! But he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins. He was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be healed. (Is. 53:4-5, NLT)
This is such good news! In Jesus Christ our Lord is the miracle of a perfect God at peace with an imperfect world. He is the one answer with power to speak peace into the divided mess that is us. In his own body — in that union of divinity and humanity — Jesus proves that peace for imperfect people longing for a perfect world is possible for us, too. Which means that something as clinical-sounding as “hypostatic union” is as personal as our longings and as hopeful as the empty tomb. It is our assurance that Jesus has come not just to get us to heaven but to heal our divided lives now.
Knowing that Jesus has power to tear down all “dividing walls of hostility,” we can begin to practice the peace that Jesus has shown us in himself. Even if we don’t feel it we can “act as if” (to borrow a phrase from recovery circles) Christ’s work is sufficient to heal our divided selves. We can act as if our biggest internal battles are won on days when doubt creeps in. We can act as if our recovery is complete even if we’re still on the journey, and as if our relationships are healed even if they are still in process. We can act as if our physical health is improving, as if our depression is healing, as if our finances are stabilizing, even while those things are still under construction.
In short, we can know peace in this life, and Jesus — full God, fully man — is our assurance of this truth. The same power that held his divinity and humanity together in that blessed manger can hold us together, too. And the God of peace, as Paul writes to the Thessalonians, “can sanctify (us) through and through” (1 Thes. 5:23) — spirit, soul and body. This makes Christ Jesus all the more worthy of our worship, and the Incarnation all the more worthy of our celebration.
