The incarnation of God in human body is a mystery.
I don’t have a better way to say this.
Unless I add the adjective Impossible to modify the word mystery.
Because the world does not contain God.
The world can’t contain God.
The world is smaller then God.
However, God may be in the world, testified to by the world, but be sure. God is not just the world or the universe or star dust. We’re star dust, God is something different from all that.
Which is a whole other mystery.
Or several mysteries actually…
Like Where does God come from?
Like Why does God exist and can we even use that word“exist” which implies limitations of life and death or being and not being?
Like What does God want from us?
So if Jesus is fully God, fully human
Then how does the infinitely Divine make room for the very limited human?
Especially when we start with an infant?
Or the cell quickened to life by Holy Will?
Or the odd turn one afternoon near the river Jorden of a sudden appearance of a dove, a light, and the Roman words of adoption, “This is my son” that transform a human into the Son of God?
The mystery is how the two co-exist.
What use does God have of a son? Is God seeking grandchildren? Someone who will inherit his father’s and mother’s work at the end of God’s life? Elder care when God grows fragile? Does God age? Is God subject to the Universe’s constrains of time and space? Why does God seek a Son? There is something else here that is important to God – and to us – because we place this claim, this idea that God gives, releases, creates something of God’s self that we call a son and could call a daughter for the benefit of humans – us – so firmly in the center of what we claim to be true. Why?
I think its vulnerability.
Because we need vulnerability if we are going to be community to each other. We need to need community – and each other.
And it looks like community is not just God’s own existence of the trinitarian self expression but also God’s desire for all of us contained within God’s creation.
Connected.
To each other and to all the living creatures here with us and the land and waters that support us all. We’re vulnerable to each other.
So maybe what God is doing in this story is God is putting a part of God’s own being into our world, into our existence, radically needing us to care for this inserted part of God.
God enters our world as a specific and fragile human being, in need of our friendship, our love, our support. Jesus recruits disciples and shares his ministry with them. Jesus needs his people to walk with him.
And, if God enters our world as a baby, then what we’re claiming is that God finds one of the most fragile moment of our existence and says, “here I am.”
God says, “I need you.”
Which is impossible.
How does God need us?
Jesus sits by a well in a village. He sends away his disciples to find food so that he is now alone. He is thirsty and does not have a way to fetch water from the well. So he waits until a stranger comes and makes him an offer.
The Samaritan Woman who’s name we’ve forgotten arrives with an offer of water and friendship. She receives a deeper gift, what some might call Soul Friend – Anam Cara.
the Irish writer, theologian, and poet, John O’ Donohue writes about the experience of encountering a soul friend like this: ,
“It is precisely in awakening and exploring this rich and opaque inner landscape that the anam-cara experience illuminates the mystery and kindness of the divine. The anam cara is God’s gift. Friendship is the nature of God. The Christian concept of God as Trinity is the most sublime articulation of Otherness and intimacy, an eternal interflow of friendship. This perspective discloses the beautiful fulfillment of our immortal longings in the words of Jesus who said: ‘I call you friends.’ Jesus as the Son of God is the first Other in the universe; he is the prism of all difference. He is the secret anam cara of every individual. In friendship with him we enter the tender beauty and affection of the Trinity. In the embrace of this eternal friendship, we dare to be free. … Consequently , love is anything but sentimental. In fact, it is the most real and creative form of human presence. Love is the threshold where divine and human presence ebb and flow into each other.”
pg 36-37, Anamcara: Spiritual Wisdom From the Celtic World, John O’Donohue, Bantam Books, 19997
Jesus needed to need something from the Samaritan Woman so she could encounter the source of living water.
Jesus, God incarnate, made himself vulnerable, needy, dependent on others and when he did that – lives and villages and us were and still are changed.
Here is one of the mysteries for this season:
Apparently we are Jesus’ friends.
We help Jesus, who needs us.
Through being needed, we also become sons and daughters of God
We are also needed by God’s creation
In these relationships
We are not alone
We are necessary
In mystery
And holy
Ebb and flow
God
You
Me
All of us
You might also find this posting from Diana Butler Bass interesting: Friendship with Bodies