The Incarnation
How Fred Claus brought me to a humbling yet beautiful understanding of Christmas.
Last night, my family and I were watching the movie, Fred Claus. In the movie, Fred (Vince Vaughn) is the black sheep brother of Nicholas (Paul Giamatti) aka St. Nicholas aka Santa Claus. They are a supremely dysfunctional family thanks to their mother and I always enjoy the way Vince Vaughn plays these characters. The subtle jabs and the not so subtle. The mock offense. The charming play with words to make the character forget they were mad. I appreciate that level of manipulation. But none of that, is why I’m writing this.
The ultimate premise of the movie, ends up being that there should be no naughty and nice list. No kids are really naughty. Many if not all of them are dealing with pain and suffering that results in their bad behavior and they all deserve a gift on Christmas.
This confused my daughters a little bit because clearly these kids were doing naughty things so how could one say they aren’t naughty? I proceeded to discuss with them that surely what they did was wrong. Sinful acts are wrong. That being said, the kids were doing the wrong thing because of the pain they felt from the suffering in their lives. Why is there pain and suffering? Because of sin. It’s a vicious cycle that we are all stuck in, and because we are all stuck in it, we don’t have the right to label each other naughty and nice and determine what each other deserves. Everyone of us has the potential to be the most evil person that ever lived.
So then who does have the right? Only God. In fact, in Psalm 51, King David after murdering Uriah the Hittite to cover up his affair with Uriah’s wife Bathsheba, says to God that “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned” (v. 4). All sin is ultimately against God. It would not be sin if not for God being an eternal, holy standard from whose character all rightness flows. And we would not know it was sin if He had not given us His commandments. He is the sole judge of who is “naughty or nice” and He is right to determine us all “evil.”
I, then, began to explain how this is why we need Jesus, and what He did on the cross to fix our situation. To free us from the cycle of sin and suffering. To be determined righteous and to be called God’s children. Why he had to become one of us. They already know these points but it is always good practice to reinforce the basics. Especially when it comes to the gospel.
At this point, the details get kind of fuzzy because I was just responding to whatever a 5 or 7 year old might think or say in this moment as Daddy tries to explain important and profound theological and doctrinal truths because one of them asked a question about Fred Claus. Either way, one of them said something that led me to the decision to try and get them to really understand what we are and the lowliness of our estate. Whatever it was that was said to lead me down this trail, God used it to speak to me as I spoke to them.
I began to describe God forming us from the dirt. (Genesis 2:7) How we are literally dirt and water. Mostly Carbon and a bunch of trace minerals and metals, some gases like Nitrogen and H2O. He made a body out of mud and then that same verse says that He “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” The mud came to life. And from a piece of the original mud body, he created another mud body that lived so that we would not be alone. We are mud creatures.
My children, of course, found this funny. Rightly so, it is funny, but it’s also true. And I stressed that to them. We are mud creatures. We are naught but dirt and water and worth nothing! Nothing at all, except that we bear His image (Genesis1:26-27) and He loves us. (John 3:16)
Continuing in verse 8, he put the mud creatures in a garden that they had to tend to, but with little effort so as to produce all manner of delicious food.(v.15) It was a perfect place that God would visit often to spend time with the mud creatures. And the mud creatures rebelled against God though He had done nothing to deserve it. He had not wronged them or hurt them but only given to them generously. Even so, they rebelled and did evil, evil things all the time and perpetuated this cycle of evil and suffering trapping themselves.
But despite their rebellion and their evil ways, God still loved the mud creatures. He loved them so much… (here’s where I could barely speak the sentence because all of a sudden, what I was saying had become deeply impactful) …that he became a mud creature. He became one of us.
He became one of us so that he could live a perfect life to break the cycle of sin and suffering. So that He could bear the punishment that we all deserve through His death on the cross. So that He could be raised from the dead to defeat death on our behalf so that we could be called His children and live with Him for eternity in paradise. And to this day, He remains a mud creature, yet a perfected mud creature and we who repent and believe will be perfected mud creatures too. And we deserve none of it.
This is why we celebrate Christmas. Christmas is the day that God, Himself stepped down from His perfect heaven and from his throne over all creation and He became a mud creature. Like us. But better.