Reflections
from The Hill - The Word is worth a thousand
pictures
With just
over seven billion people on this planet – and counting – the least we can say
is that makes for a lot of flesh.
In our raw or
clothed states, we bodies communicate with each other, largely with words. In
itself, this is no big deal but the challenge is for us to consider the number
of words that get spoken or written by us on any day.
One statistic
I saw claimed that, on one blog site alone on a certain day, over 50 million
words were recorded. That’s the equivalent of 100 copies of Les Miserables or War and Peace, written in one day on one
blog site.
Multiply that
by the total number of blog sites, add to this number the words spoken on radio,
TV and two-ways and those written in newspapers, magazines, letters, books,
novels and emails and all those words of which there is no record (like
conversations here, there and everywhere), and the figure becomes
astronomical.
We humans do
this all the time, quite naturally and mostly badly. I call it the
“flesh-into-words” phenomenon, a useful and sometimes lucrative business. You
might call it communication.
Think for a
moment, though, about the opposite process, the “word-into-flesh” and,
straightaway, we’re into another
ballpark.
We know how
the former comes about, but what about the latter? How does that happen? If
we’re serious about Christmas, this would have to be the key question of the
day.
Leaving aside
the Shepherds and Wise Men, we are dealing with a deeply significant issue here
and we’d do well to get our mind around
it.
If it’s true
that the word became flesh (personally, I don’t dispute that), my question is
this: how does one such en-flesh-ment change anything among so many inhabitants
of this blue planet?
Being a little creative can help.
In fact, beginning with words that can create something in us is, in fact, the
best place to start.
At lots of levels, “I love you”
are words that have the potential to unlock all that is good and true in us as
we pursue life. They have a creative energy in
them.
These words lie at the heart of
what “word-into-flesh” – and therefore Christmas – is all about. It’s a
staggering idea.
So profound is this notion that
John, the writer of The Christmas Gospel, in an attempt to help our minds grasp
the enormity of it, describes this process of the word-becoming-flesh as ‘God
pitching His tent among us’.

That ought to
grab the holiday-makers gearing up for their week on Straddie or wherever they
go. The story, however, began with Mary hearing from the Big Angel but she was
also blown away by what he said.
Raised in a shame-blame culture
that is, even today, particularly hard on women, Mary would never have hoped to
have found favour with anyone, let alone God.
This simple moment in a young
girl’s life should be enough for us to understand what the theologians try so
hard to explain. (Sometimes, in our attempts at cleverness, we complicate simple
ideas. I suspect this is one such example.)
What God
wants each of us to know is that we have found favour with Him;
that we are blessed and that He
wants to be fruitful through us, not because we are better than anyone else but
because we have stumbled onto a surprise: that the Word of God’s love is here
for everyone.
Each of us long to hear the “Hail
….” (put your own name on the dots); to hear it in our own ears because that’s
what we long for most of all. God’s “Hail” brings us to life and is at the heart
of the Christmas process.
The
Incarnation (another name for en-flesh-ment) is not only a moment in
history, it’s the start of an ongoing journey, beginning with Jesus and fruiting
in every believer in every age.
Jesus gets incarnated in every
Christ follower every time s/he comes to faith. His word of love, compassion,
forgiveness, healing and peace comes and takes flesh in our
lives.
The Incarnation of the Word of God
into human flesh happened first in Jesus and that’s what we celebrate this and
every Christmas.
It doesn’t end there though. The
Incarnation is the ongoing fruit of the transformation of our life, by the
fruiting Word-being-made-flesh in us.
Here we have
an endless array of pictures of life, thousands upon thousands of them, all
springing from the One Word, as they should.