You'd need
to have something of the Divine about you to make up such an account like the
Incarnation - and therefore believing it to be a real piece of history one gets
to tap into a little bit of understanding of the genius of God. Think for a
minute about how astounding this really is; God, who is awesome enough to
create the entire universe and everything in it, demonstrated an act of such
grace-filled humility that He allowed Himself to be governed by, abused by,
humiliated by, tortured by, and ultimately put to death by people whose only power
over Him comes by the very power He gives them in the first place.
We find
this account in John's gospel, where, when Pilate thinks the captured Jesus is
refusing to speak to him declares "Don’t you realise I have power either
to free you or to crucify you?” To which Jesus answered, “You would have no
power over me if it were not given to you from above. Therefore the one who
handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.” What He's effectively saying
is, "Hey, I have the power to put you in your place, but because I love
you I'm going to grant you the freedom to mess up, and then use your bad deeds
to offer you and everyone else the free gift of salvation."
There
are countless things about reality to marvel at, to be astounded by, and to be
challenged by - but for me that one little passage of time in history
compresses the whole genius of God into a succinct reality more than anything
else I know (along with the nature of mathematics, although that evokes a quite
different feeling). You probably can recall when President Nelson Mandela had
the political power to condemn the people that maltreated him but chose to
forgive them. God does this on a universal scale.
The
creator of the universe hung up on a cross being tortured by people whose only
power comes from the grace of the God they are torturing, and begging the
Father for their forgiveness because Divine love understands fully that
"they know not what they do" is the moment in history, for me, when
the corporeal and the Divine interlock, and when the Christian faith does its
most illuminating work in shining light on the truth of God.
The
genius of it is that it is the only reality that could properly satisfy the
narrative of an all-powerful, all-loving God retaining complete sovereignty
over creation, yet simultaneously lowering Himself to be sufficiently involved
in the story that He can provide a salvation offering that fully conjoins His
omnipotence with His Divine love and grace in a way that we can understand.
The
genius of Christ is that He provided His creation with the emotional route to
Divinity by way of giving us the above to respond to. And if that wasn't
enough, He also gave us another glimpse of His genius by exhibiting perfect
evidence that He is the cosmic mind behind the mathematical patterns in the
universe.
