The Inconvenient Incarnation

Have you ever thought about what a great blessing pain is? You accidentally brush your hand against a hot stove and you recoil in pain. But what would happen if there were no pain and you were to just leave your hand there?

There is a disease called Hansen’s Disease. It is better known as leprosy. It attacks the nerve endings of the body and causes them to become dead to pain. That may sound like a pretty good deal—no more pain. But the victims of Hansen’s Disease find that, because they can feel no pain, they injure their bodies without even knowing it.

They might wear a pair of poorly fitting shoes and cripple their feet. Or they might burn their fingers without even being aware of it. That’s why many sufferers of leprosy are terribly disfigured—they are missing fingers and toes and hands and feet. Because they feel no pain.

Pain is a gift from God, not something to be afraid of. It’s a protection; it is a warning that something is wrong and needs to be fixed, lest something even worse happen.

But most Americans are obsessed with avoiding pain. That’s why we have such a drug problem. People take drugs to deaden the pain of an empty life. That’s why we’re so obsessed with entertainment—it helps us to forget that real life can often be painful.

And that’s why we often misunderstand the Christmas story. Because we do not see that the story of the Incarnation—the story about how God became a man—is a story that happens to be full of pain.

You won’t see that on your Christmas cards. Your average Christmas card has a warm, soft-focus glow about it. The angels, the shepherds, the holy family all gathered ’round the manger in a peaceful, mellow scene.

We wish each other “Merry Christmas”, and we use words like love, goodwill, cheer, happiness to describe the season. But when you look at the original story of Christmas in the Bible, this is not what you see. You see pain, disruption, anxiety, and fear.

The truth is, the Incarnation was a highly inconvenient event to all concerned. It cost all the leading characters a great deal of pain to be involved in this drama of God becoming man.

Think of what it cost Mary. One day, she’s a normal everyday Jewish teenager living in a small town in Galilee. The next day, an angel of God announces to her that she’s going to have a baby conceived by the Holy Spirit. This creates a gigantic problem. She’s engaged to be married to a good man named Joseph, and having a baby doesn’t exactly fit in with her wedding plans.

Nowadays, with over a million babies born to unwed mothers per year in our country, this may not seem to be such a big deal. But I assure you that in first century Judea, it was.

Mary was going to have to live with the shame, the gossip, and the innuendos about her reputation for the rest of her life. And her engagement to Joseph would be in jeopardy now, too. What would he think? How could she possibly explain her swelling womb to her fiancee?

This was going to inflict pain on Joseph too. When Mary was found to be with child, as far as Joseph was concerned, it meant that she had been unfaithful to him. But because he still loved her and didn’t want to disgrace her publicly, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.

You have to realize that engagement as practiced in those days was much more binding than it is today. The only way for a man and woman who were betrothed to each other to break that relationship was through divorce. That was certainly Joseph’s biblical right - the Bible sanctions divorce in cases of adultery, and it certainly looked as though Mary had committed adultery.

But the Lord intervened and sent an angel to explain to Joseph that things were not exactly as they appeared. Mary was still pure. She was still a virgin. She had been faithful to him, but she had also been faithful to God who had asked her to undertake this awesome responsibility.

And the result of her willingness to be a part of God’s plan was inconvenience, embarrassment, and uncertainty. And for Joseph, it was humiliation and that feeling that men hate most of all—the feeling of not being in control.

Joseph and Mary lived in Nazareth, a small town in Galilee. Joseph had a carpentry business there. He was a woodworker—a builder by trade. Not a prestigious job, to be sure, but a good honest way to make a living. You can imagine how he felt when he heard the news that he had to leave the business and move.

A thousand miles away, in Rome, an emperor named Caesar Augustus decided that it would be a good idea to take a census for the purpose of taxing the citizens of the Roman Empire. Everyone had to go back to his hometown to register.

For Joseph and Mary, that meant that they would have to leave their home in Nazareth and make an inconvenient and dangerous 100 mile journey to Bethlehem, the home of their ancestors. And the timing couldn’t have been worse.

Mary was almost due to give birth. This would mean that she would be taken away from her home and her family - her whole support system. Not a good idea. But they had to go. They had no choice. Not because of Caesar’s decree, but because of God’s decree, given through Micah the prophet, that the Messiah should be born in Bethlehem.

Micah 5:2 “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.”

So Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem. I’m sure that they were beginning to wonder what they had gotten into. I’m sure that they began to feel a sense of uprootedness and insecurity ever since they had said “yes” to God.

We can only imagine what they must have felt when they finally arrived in Bethlehem, only to find that all the accommodations were taken. Surely, if God had sent them to Bethlehem to have this baby, He could have at least arranged ahead for a hotel reservation? But there was nothing. There was nobody waiting for them. Nobody welcomed them. Nobody had room for them. It seemed that nobody even knew or cared that they existed.

Can you imagine how frightened and miserable and exhausted they both must have been in the midst of all this? But you don’t see any of that on your Christmas cards, do you?

And so the time came for Mary to give birth. It was probably in a cave—a place where they kept animals. The only reason we have for saying that is that she laid her newborn baby in a manger, a feeding trough.

I don’t need to remind you mothers of what it feels like to give birth. It is painful, to say the least. Mary felt that same pain. When God was born into this world as a baby, his birth was accompanied by pain. And his birth would lead to even more pain to all involved.

A few weeks later, when Joseph and Mary dedicated their baby at the Temple, they were met by a godly old man named Simeon. And Simeon said to Mary “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.”

“A sword piercing…” Those are words of pain. And that sword was much closer than Joseph and Mary realized.

Imagine that a young couple were to give birth to a baby boy at the Lehigh Valley Hospital. They take the child home with them and the baby begins to grow. But then a few months later, the husband receives some disturbing and very reliable information in the middle of the night. The baby’s life is in imminent danger.

The husband is told that his infant son is on the FBI’s most wanted list. In fact, the President of the United States has put out a warrant for the baby’s arrest and execution. But the government doesn’t yet know the exact identity of the baby; all they know is that the little boy was born a few months earlier in the Lehigh Valley.

So the very next day, the husband quickly throws a few belongings into a suitcase, scrapes together his meager resources, hurries his family down to the Philadelphia International Airport and catches the next flight to Mexico. And that’s where they find themselves a few days later—strangers, fugitives, in a strange land.

Meanwhile, government agents close in on the Lehigh Valley. The National Guard throws up roadblocks on the main highways. People with infant seats in their cars are pulled over by the state police. Hospital records are checked. Families with infant sons born in the last two years receive the terrifying news that their babies are wanted for a special emergency medical testing program being conducted by the U.S. Government. And they never see them again.

This is what happened in Bethlehem. A paranoid king named Herod got wind that a new king had been born in Bethlehem some time in the previous year or so. So he responded in typical fashion. Herod was a man who had killed his own wife and two of his sons. He ordered that all the male babies two years old and younger be taken from their parents and executed.

That’s how the Christmas story ends in the Gospel of Matthew. With a verse that reads “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” But you never see that verse on a Christmas card.

The birth of Jesus brought pain and disruption to Mary and Joseph. It brought pain and disruption to the community in which he was born. And it also brought pain to Jesus himself.

The Bible teaches us that when God became a man, he emptied himself. Listen to the words in Philippians 2 as I read them from the Contemporary English Version…

Christ was truly God. But he did not try to remain equal with God. He gave up everything and became a slave when he became one of us. He obeyed God and even died on a cross.

What did Jesus give up when he became one of us? He gave up his glory and his place of prominence as God. He gave up his independence and power as the Creator of the Universe in order to become a tiny little baby who couldn’t talk, couldn’t eat solid food, couldn’t control his own bladder, and had to rely on a couple of scared Jewish teenagers for shelter, food, and safety.

As a human being, one of the awful tolls of aging is that you begin to lose your faculties. Your hearing goes, then your eyesight. Your teeth fall out and so does your hair. You begin to lose your memory. You may lose your ability to walk. Some elderly people experience the terror of losing their minds and their personalities.

Take that, and multiply it a thousand-fold and you begin to have an inkling of what it must have been like for God to become a man. He emptied himself, and that emptying must have been excruciatingly painful. But no more painful than going to the cross and experiencing the awful terror of God’s forsaking him.

Why is there so much pain in the Christmas story? Why is the Incarnation infused with suffering and agony and tears?

It is because of sin. When we turn our backs on God, we willingly walk down a road which leads ultimately to eternal suffering and death. The disease of sin infects all of us. If it is left untreated, it is terminal.

But the treatment for sin is painful and very costly. “Without the shedding of blood, there can be no remission of sin.” It costs one man giving his life for another. That man is Jesus.

A few years ago, I knew of a family with two children, a boy and a girl. They were perfectly normal kids leading perfectly normal lives until one day the girl got sick. And she didn’t get better.

Tests showed that she was suffering from leukemia—a disease of the blood. There was only one hope for her. She needed a bone marrow transplant. Her brother was the only one who could give her the type of bone marrow she needed. So he willingly underwent surgery to extract some of his bone marrow to give to his sister. And that saved her life. Her brother was, in that physical sense, her savior.

The cure for this disease we call sin works on a similar principle—you take someone who is healthy and you give what makes them healthy to the one who is sick. Now as sinners, we don’t need something as trivial as a bone marrow transplant; we need a life transplant.

You see, our lives are tainted and corrupted by sin. It’s like a cancer that has wrapped its tendrils around every part of us. We need somebody whose life is not tainted and infected by sin to be willing to give us his life so that we can be made well. Who is that someone? It is Jesus. When he died on the cross, he was giving up his life in exchange for ours. And when we receive him as our Savior, the Bible says that we receive his life.

Did it hurt Jesus to make that transaction? Indeed it did. But he did it anyway. Because the pain of the cure was much better to endure than to let the sickness run its course. Have you received Jesus as your Savior?

What about the pain of Mary and Joseph? They were willing to suffer pain in order to be a part of God’s plan. And their suffering indirectly contributed to our salvation.

I believe that anytime you say “yes” to God, it’s going to cost you something. It may cost you some pain. It will certainly cost you the acceptance and approval of the world. But the pain you endure in order to follow God will always have a redemptive result. Others will come to know Jesus Christ because of your willingness to count the cost.

It was true of Joseph and Mary. And it can be true of you. Are you willing to experience some pain in order to fit into God’s plan?

You see, God demands a lot from us. When we say “yes” to him, we’re giving up control of our lives. We want to manage our lives so as to minimize pain. But that is not what God necessarily wants for us.

So I guess it comes down to: Are you more ready to trust God, or are you more ready to trust yourself?

I think if you were to ask Mary and Joseph about the pain they experienced because they said “yes” to God, they would say the same thing a mother says when she reflects on childbirth: “The pain goes away. But the blessing goes on forever.”