The Trinity has begun a good
work in us which he will bring to completion.
This good work is the Incarnation of God the Son as Jesus the Messiah of
the Jews who is Lord and Saviour of all Creation. Paul in Ephesians 1 said that this was the
plan that God had from before creation to bring all things under one head, to
unite all things in Christ. At the very conception
of this baby, God united himself not only to humanity but to even physical
matter, the creation. The Incarnation
has bigger effect than just on us.
The early church Fathers
thought about the Incarnation differently than we are accustomed. They emphasized that the Incarnation was for
healing. As Jesus the Trinity has infused
humanity with his very self and has thusly changed humanity, a change that
includes healing humanity of sin and death.
I used to say that by the incarnation God infected humanity with his
very self and reversed the infection that humanity suffers due to sin which
culminates in death pervading throughout the creation. I used to use that infection metaphor but a
man in my last church said that’s not a helpful word and suggested the idea of
infusion was better. With infection a
virus gets into something and grows exponentially until it either kills its
host or implodes and dies. Humanity
looks like a virus on earth. The human
population is growing exponentially and destroying its host. That’s not quite the way God is working in
us.
Infusion is a better
metaphor for the Incarnation. It is the process of how we
make tea. A tea bag is placed into hot
water and the tea begins to permeate the water and we have tea. So also by Incarnation God has infused
his very self into the creation particularly humanity and now by the
continued working of the Holy Spirit the permeation continues and will continue until its completion when Jesus returns and
as Isaiah prophecies at 11:9 that “the earth will be full of the knowledge of
God as the waters covers the sea.”
Now, we’re not done with the
tea metaphor yet. Tea bags have
medicinal properties as well. If you
take a moist tea bag and place it on an infected wound it will draw out the
infection. This is called expiation. Expiation is the other side of the
incarnation. Jesus draws the sin of
humanity, our infection, our disease, our impurity into himself like the
scapegoat on the Day of Atonement and bears it away unto death, his death on
the cross. He expiates us of sin. He heals us.
He unburdens us of our. This is what
forgiveness is.
By the gift of God the Holy
Spirit coming to live in us we are the body of Christ bound to Jesus our head and
he is permeating us with the new life of his resurrected humanity and this has
the effect of expiating, of healing us of our sin and death, a healing that
will come to its fruition on the day when he returns and we are also raised
from the dead. But anyway, this is just
a little something for you to think about the next time you are enjoying a cup
of tea hopefully with others because that just makes the metaphor complete. Amen.
