Monthly Archives: December 2025

God’s Christmas Gift

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At Christmas, we celebrate the birth of a baby. Babies are born all the time but this one is different. The baby we celebrate this night is God incarnate. What’s so special about that? Don’t we tend to treat babies like little gods, revolving our lives around them? Weren’t the shepherds oohing and aahing the way people do when they see a pretty baby? Such is the appeal of Christmas.

However, the startling claim made by various church fathers, Irenaeus probably being the first and Athanasius another early witness, is that God became human so that humans could become God. The antiphon for the Feast of the Holy Name is: “O marvelous exchange! [Our] Creator has become [human], born of the Virgin. We have been made sharers in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” It’s like a billionaire offering a person living homeless on the streets his or her bank account for the few coins the street person has collected that day. Who would do such a thing? The divine exchange is infinitely more lopsided that this. What kind of God would think of giving God’s divinity for the sake of our humanity? I suppose the answer is that only an infinitely and unbelievably generous god would do such a thing.

What these church fathers and the author of this antiphon are proclaiming is that our humanity has been radically altered for all time by this glorious exchange. There is a divine presence in each of us waiting for us to allow it to unfold in unbelievable and mysterious ways. Some people get the impression that the notion of humans becoming God leads to blurring distinctions between humans and God, or humans even supplanting God. There have been thinkers who have made suggestions along those lines, but in sound Christian doctrine that is not the case. In 2 Peter 1: 4, the phrase that inspired Irenaeus and Athanasius is “partakers of the Divine Nature.” That is, we participate in the divine nature. This leaves our humanity fully intact, just as Jesus’ humanity is fully intact even though he is fully divine. Moreover, this partaking of the divine nature is a gift from God, not an accomplishment on our part.

Before getting too excited about partaking of the divine nature, it behooves us to reflect on what we’re getting into. Since we don’t have any experience of being God, we don’t know much about it. All of us have fantasies about what we would do if we were God. For myself, I would readjust the social and political structures worldwide to my satisfaction. Never mind that everybody else with similar fantasies would do the same thing and we’d have an in infinite mess. However, the fact that God would exchange God’s divinity for our humanity does give us an important clue as to what being God, the true God, is about. The billionaire in the analogy who traded his or her bank account for the coins of a street person is amazingly generous, but God is infinitely generous. If I’m not so sure about being as generous as this fantasy billionaire, then maybe I’m not up to being as generous as God.

Partaking of the divine nature has some far-reaching consequences for our sense of identity. If I am inclined to clutch at what I think my identity is, I won’t want God coming in to mess with that and throw me off course; never mind that my own course is out of the ballpark. In order to partake of God’s nature, receiving it as a gift, I have to empty myself of all my favorite illusions about who I think I am. Mary pondered the mystery of her son’s birth in her heart. We, like Mary, need to spend time in stillness, pondering God’s Christmas gift to us, letting it sink into our depths with the new life it brings. As we ponder, we might think ahead to where the story of this birth took Jesus in a few years and where it will take us in a few months. Partaking of the divine nature entails partaking of the divine generosity of the Paschal Mystery.

On Welcoming Jesus

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Advent is a time when we anticipate God’s coming into our lives in mysterious ways. But are we really looking forward to God coming to us, or are we expecting business as usual, even if business isn’t all that good? Do we believe that God can affect our lives, or do we live on the assumption that such does not happen?

During a time of crisis, King Ahaz is urged to ask a sign of God but refuses to do so. (Is. 7: 1-12) Why? Asking God for a sign would alert him to the possibility that God might enter his life in some way. Business is bad, with the Assyrians threatening Jerusalem, but maybe he would rather be trampled by a powerful army then open himself up to what God might do. In the face of the king’s closing himself off, the prophet Isaiah announces a sign whether the king likes it or not. The sign doesn’t seem like much up against an invading army. How is a new born child going to solve the problem? Well, it isn’t exactly the baby who solves the problem; it’s God who solves the problem with a nudge that sends the invading army away. The baby was a sign of hope for the future, as babies often are. Nothing happens here that conflicts with the laws of nature. After all, God can accomplish much with the laws of nature. (The old translation that had a “virgin” conceiving in Isaiah’s time is considered by almost all scholars to be a mistranslation.) Now God’s little but decisive nudge wasn’t so bad was it? The only problem was that the king wasn’t in control of the situation. Not letting God control his situation would lead to Assyria controlling the situation. Is it easier to cope with being controlled by other humans that in some mysterious way being controlled, or at least led, by God? That is a particularly good question for us to ask ourselves during Advent.

Fast forward to Joseph confronted with a betrothed woman who has become pregnant, but not by him. Knowing the laws of nature as well as any modern gynecologist, Joseph decides to divorce Mary discretely, but before he can carry out his resolve, he is challenged by a dream to believe that God has intervened directly in violation to normal natural law. One could say it is once again just a little nudge. Once the conception of the child has taken place, the child develops in Mary’s womb like any other child and, when born, is just as fully human as any other child. But this little wedge, or nudge, is a big one, even a cosmic one. It is a nudge that has fundamentally changed the world for all time. And yet this little nudge, in spite of being contrary to natural law, did not send an army away. The Roman army stuck around and did its work, including the crucifixion of criminals, one of whom turned out to be the child conceived by the Holy Spirit. On the surface it doesn’t look like much of an intervention.

At this point we might ask ourselves: Do we need a decisive intervention from God such as Matthew claims to have happened with the conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary? Maybe business as usual has been bad, but at least we’re used to it. St. Paul, however, insisted that humanity had become a train wreck and needed the direct presence of God within humanity before anything could get better. St. Augustine and subsequent theologians have seconded the motion. The modern thinker René Girard has offered us anthropological insights to suggest that we are too entangled in rivalrous relationships for any of them to be disentangled unless there is intervention from outside the system, which to say: from God. So, business is bad, as I said, but do we prefer the bad business as usual to the unknown possibilities that might emerge if we embrace the child born of the Virgin Mary? Christmas is coming. Do we really want Christ to come?