Part Eight: The Heart of the Gospel

The word “incarnation” means “in the flesh.” The Incarnation is the Christian doctrine that God Himself came to dwell among us “in the flesh” as Jesus of Nazareth. He came to share our lot, to participate in our human condition, with all its limitations. He came to share with us, as one of us, all the joys, sorrows, and pains of the human journey. As an Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, once wrote:

The divine Creator has humbled himself to take upon Himself the entire experience of existence as man, in all the conditions of humanity. That is what we call the Incarnation. That is the heart of Christian belief. … God’s answer to our need is to give Himself utterly to us, in the total self-donation of the Word-made-flesh.

Or we can put it more simply still, in the words of the traditional English Christmas carol “Once in Royal David’s City” (the second and third stanzas):

He came down to earth from heaven
Who is God and Lord of all,
And His shelter was a stable,
And His cradle was a stall.
With the poor and mean and lowly
Lived on earth our Savior holy.

For He is our childhood’s pattern,
Day by day like us He grew.
He was little, weak and helpless,
Tears and smiles like us He knew.
And He feeleth for our sadness,
And He shareth in our gladness.

If this Gospel of the Incarnation is true, then it has huge implications for our understanding of the problem of human misery and suffering. For to begin with, it means that God our Creator does not ask us to walk through any depth of misery and suffering that He was not willing to walk through Himself. Talk about innocent suffering! — who ever experienced innocent suffering more deeply than Jesus Christ? Emmanuel, God with us, He lived a human life of perfect love for His heavenly Father and for others, setting the example of authentic love for us to imitate — only to be put to death on the cross for it!

As a result, while we may not always be able to see why God permits the innocent to suffer so much in particular situations — from hunger, disease, violence or injustice — there is at least one thing we can know: our Lord has journeyed through the depths of human misery Himself. As the prophet Isaiah wrote (Is 53: 3-4):

He was despised and rejected by men,
A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief….
Surely he has borne our griefs,
And carried our sorrows.

God’s identification with our suffering reached its climax, of course, on Calvary, where Jesus spoke the most amazing words that He ever uttered: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46; Mk 15:34). On the Cross, the Son of God actually asked why His heavenly Father had abandoned Him at the very time He most needed to feel His Father’s comfort and strength sustaining Him.

This is an experience that many of us can relate to. It sometimes happens that in moments of crisis, in times of extreme personal and emotional suffering, that is precisely when our loving God seems farthest away. It can come as a terrible shock to the sincere and faithful soul when he or she first goes through such an experience of seeming divine abandonment.

The first thing to appreciate about Jesus Christ’s own cry of abandonment on the Cross is that He evidently loved us so much, He was even willing to go through the experience of this spiritual desolation with us.

Now, we need to be clear that Jesus was not actually in despair on the Cross (which would have been a sin). His words about being “forsaken” are a direct quote from the first line of Psalm 22, and it was the common practice in ancient Israel to quote the first line of a psalm in order to refer to the entire text. Despite the words of desolation at the start, this psalm ends on a note of trust in God and in the triumph of His saving will. So it is probably wise to interpret the words, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” in conjunction with words that Jesus spoke soon after that: “Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit” (Lk 23:46). In other words, on the Cross Jesus may have been expressing simultaneously both the feeling of sheer human physical and emotional misery in the midst of His afflictions, and yet, at the same time, an underlying surrender to divine providence. It is as if Jesus was saying: “My God, even though I feel right now as if You are far away from me, as if  You have totally abandoned me in my misery and affliction, yet still I know that you are my Father, and so in You I put all my trust.”

Again, the Gospel message of our Lord’s cry of abandonment on the cross is that He does not ask us to walk through any depth of suffering or affliction that He has not walked through and shared Himself. He was abandoned by His friends, His disciples, and His countrymen; He experienced the most agonizing abandonment of his bodily life; and He even went through the excruciating spiritual experience of feeling abandoned by God Himself. One of my favorite expressions of this truth is found in the writings of a Protestant author from the 20th century, Bordon P. Bowne:

I know something of the arguments whereby we seek to keep our faith in the divine goodness in the midst of the world’s pain and sorrow and the manifold sinister aspects of existence. I do not disparage them; upon occasion I use them; but I always feel that at best they are only palliatives and leave the great depths of the problem untouched. There is only one argument that touches the bottom, and that is Paul’s question: “He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, will he not freely give us all things?” We look on the woes of the world. We hear the whole of creation, to use Paul’s language, groaning and laboring in pain. We see a few good men vainly striving to help the world into life and light; and in our sense of the awful magnitude of the problem and of our inability to do much, we cry out “Where is God? How can he bear this? Why doesn’t he do something?” And there is but one answer that satisfies: and that is the Incarnation and the Cross. God could not bear it. He has done something. He has done the utmost compatible with moral wisdom. He has entered into the fellowship of our suffering and misery and at infinite cost has taken the world upon His Heart that he might raise it to Himself. (Studies in Christianity, p. 99)

And of course, in doing this for us, the divine Son of God did not just come to identify with our sufferings, and share our pains and sorrows. He also went to the Cross to lift our burden of guilt, to take away our debt to God’s justice because of our sins. He came to pay the penalty on our behalf, and thereby free us from that ball-and-chain that weighs down our conscience. That’s why the prophet Isaiah also wrote (53:5-6):

He was wounded for our transgressions,
he was bruised for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that made us whole,
and by his stripes we healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
We have turned every one to his own way,
And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

 Clearly, in the Gospel story God has revealed Himself to be not just the vaguely good and benevolent Creator that human reason and Philosophy can discover, but much more: a God so “on fire” with love for us that He did not think even Bethlehem and Calvary too far to go in order to rescue us, and win our hearts for His own. It is all summed up for me in an old hymn that we used to sing at YMCA summer camp every Sunday night, years ago:

 It is a thing most wonderful,
Almost to wonderful to be,
That God’s own Son should come from heaven,
And die to save a child like me. 

And yet I know that it is true:
He came to this poor world below,
And wept and toiled, and mourned and died,
Only because He loved us so. 

I cannot tell how He could love
A child so weak, so full of sin:
His love must be most wonderful,
If He could die my love to win. 

I sometimes think about the cross,
And shut my eyes and try to see
The cruel nails and crown of thorns,
And Jesus crucified for me. 

But even could I see Him die,
I could but see a little part
Of that great love, which like a fire
Is always burning in His heart. 

And yet I want to love Thee Lord:
O light the flame within my heart,
And I will love Thee more and more,
Until I see Thee as Thou art.

Saint Paul said it best in Romans: “God shows His love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). The infinite, eternal, all-powerful, all-seeing Creator of all things loved us that much; can we not love and trust Him in return? What more could He do?

And yet, He has done much more. After the Cross came Easter morning. Our God did not just show us how much He loved us by dying for us; He also showed us the greatness of His merciful love for us by conquering death itself for us, in and through His human nature as Jesus of Nazareth. As St. Peter wrote in his first epistle (1:3-4):

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By His great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and to an inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.

Saint Paul taught us that because Jesus was risen on Easter morning we have an eternal hope beyond compare (Rom 8:17): “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed in us.” And in II Corinthians 4:17-18 he promised: “For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” This is far more than just the “reasonable hope” that Philosophy gives us: it is a promise of new life beyond imagining for those who live in union with the risen Son.

Robert Stackpole, STD

Mere Christian Fellowship

Next Time: Promises and Blessings of the Gospel