Leaving aside for the present all theological subtleties, and concentrating on the vital and actual issues, let us try to fathom the meaning of the Incarnation for us to-day--not as a matter of speculative philosophy, but as a practical reality. As the Apostle Paul puts it, God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself. [2 Corinthians 5:19] The whole value of Christ's life, and the secret of his power, is that he fully responded to the will of God, and was one with his Father in heart and mind and soul. He was not identical with God, but so vitally akin that he showed mankind the eternal nature of God; because he so fully understood God, he was so fully able to reveal Him, and to bring man into fellowship with him, and thus give us eternal life.
He could not have done this, however, had he not also entered so deeply into fellowship with man as to share to the uttermost man's sufferings and sorrows and sins, at the last bearing them in his own body on the tree, even to the point of feeling himself forsaken of God. We can speak of this wondrous experience as "identification" if we remember that it was not a mechanical identification, but a blending of spirits in the depths of sacrificial love. He saves us because he becomes one with us, bearing our sufferings and our sins, "identifying" himself with us in this sense, and so imparting to us something of his glorious faith and power.
Now is it not clear that we too, his followers, must tread this same path if we are to help to redeem mankind from its sufferings and sins? Here, surely, we see in a flash the reason for our lack of success, the weakness of so much of our social reform policy, the futility of so many of our "isms." We are not willing to pay the price; we are not willing (indeed in our own strength we are not able) to enter into the lives of others and be "crucified" with them. Far easier is it to stand a little apart, to give good advice, or some financial assistance, or propound some new social scheme.
Far be it from me to decry the efforts for social betterment that are being made, but do we not need to get far deeper than we have done? Should we not do well to stand before the Cross for a time--whatever our views on the Atonement--and try to share in some degree the mind of him who suffered there? We could not help being awed, humbled, stirred to our depths; nor could we fail to be raised to newness of life, and gain a new dynamic for our social work, because we had looked at men from the standpoint of the Cross, and had glimpsed something of the way in which God regards them.
Take two or three examples of this "identification" and its results. George Fox tells us that Priest Stevens asked him why Christ cried out "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" To which Fox replied, "At that time the sins of all mankind were upon him, and their iniquities and transgressions, with which he was wounded; which he was to bear, and to be an offering for them, as he was man, but died not as he was God. And so in that he died for all men, and tasted death for every man, he was all offering for the sins of the whole world." And then Fox adds these memorable words: "This I spake, being at that time in a measure sensible of Christ's suffering and what he went through." We have come to a deep place here; we feel we must take off our shoes, for the ground on which we stand is holy ground.
Or take Walt Whitman, a prophet of another country and of another age. He entered profoundly
into the life and struggles of humanity, and in some real sense (as Rufus Jones says of him in his
book Some Exponents of Mystical Religion) he became identified with the suffering heart of man,
and travailed in spirit with those who wept in sorrow and who sweat with toil:
Agonies are one of my changes of garments,
I do not ask the wounded parson how he feels.
I myself become the wounded person,
My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane
and observe.
Not a mutineer walks handcuffed to jail but I am
handcuffed to him and walk by his side.
Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp, hut I also
lie at the last gasp;
My face is ash-coloured--my sinews gnarl--away
from me people retreat.
"The identity experience of which Whitman has so much to say is always a double-identity. He feels himself united always with the Above as well as with the below. He reaches down in tenderness and love to human sufferers just because he feels himself to be in some real sense an organ of a larger Love than his own."
Finally, let us turn to John Woolman, and listen to his account of what he experienced during an attack of pleurisy. "I was brought so near the gates of death that I forgot my name. Being then desirous to know who I was, I saw a mass of matter of dull, gloomy colour, between the south and the east; and was informed that this mass was human beings in as great misery as they could be, and live, and that I was mixt with them, and that henceforth I might not consider myself as a distinct or separate being." And so, as long as there was a slave on earth, John Woolman felt himself enslaved.
Here we stand before the supreme mystery--the crucifixion of self, and the birth within our soul of the Christ Child. Bethlehem and Calvary are vitally connected; the Cradle involves the Cross, and the Cross illumines the Cradle. This is the heart of the Christmas experience and the Christmas message. If it seems too hard to face, if it seems to rob life of pleasure and happiness, and to set our feet on the Via Dolorosa, let us remember that it is rather the path to the highest joy and the greatest efficiency. The Wise Men brought their gifts to Bethlehem, gold, frankincense and myrrh and found their supreme joy in giving. We to-day may bring ourselves and offer our all, and--paradox of paradoxes--by giving we get, by sharing we increase.
The Christmas Gift has two sides, God's gift to us, and our gift to Him: He gives us Himself and we give ourselves to Him, and through Him to His representatives on earth, our fellow men and women. "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one or the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto Me." [Matthew 25:40.]
1. 1.. The Friend (London) Vol. 93, No. 51, 20th of 12th Month (December), 1935.