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One of the most exciting things going on in the world of medicine these days is stem cell transplants. Stem cells are preformative blood cells taken from bone marrow or from whole blood. They are given to people who have blood cancers such as Leukemia after they have had extensive chemo treatments that have destroyed their immune system. The stem cells start to grow and replace the patient’s immune system with mature, healthy cells that can fight off the remaining cancer cells. The procedure is remarkably successful in curing certain cancers. It has also shown promise with Type 1 diabetes. There have been several cancer patients with HIV/AIDS who have been cured of both the cancer and the AIDS after a stem cell transplant from a person who was HIV resistant.
The concept of stem cell transplantation is simple. Insert healthy yet unformed cells into a diseased environment that has been stripped of its own compromised ability to fight the disease. As the transplanted cells grow, they fill the host with healthy cells that can effectively fight and eliminate the disease. And you know what? I think this is a good analogy for talking about what God is doing in his Creation through the Incarnation of God the Son as the man Jesus. Please humour for a moment as I explain and please keep in mind that all analogies have their limitations.
God created humanity in God’s own image. It’s difficult for us to grasp but God is Trinity; the loving communion of the “Persons” of God the Father, Son, Son, and Holy Spirit. Three relational beings who give themselves to each other so utterly in self-giving, unconditional mutual love that they are in essence One. God created humanity to reflect this image of loving communion within God’s good and blessed Creation. But we’re sick. We are sick in our minds; in the way we see life and ourselves in it. We, like God, exist as persons in relationship. We exist as persons in networks of relationship apart from which we have no identity. But instead of giving ourselves to each other in unconditional love so that we together can be what we were created to be, we are turned inward on ourselves proudly defining ourselves as a self-actualizing, autonomous, rational individual who does what “I” want to and becomes what “I” want. “I” usurp the place of God in my life with the unholy trinity of “Me, Myself, and I”. Instead of being in loving relationship with the rest of humanity and indeed the whole Creation we humans act autonomously and use others and the Creation for our own self-actualization. The end result is that we are like a virus or, dare I say a cancer in God’s good and blessed Creation. We live by predation. We pollute. In the pursuit of our “inalienable rights” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” we actually cause poverty, hunger, and the spread of disease. Worst of all, we tend to inadvertently hurt those we love the most.
We suffer from a cancerous disease called Sin and the end result is that the image of God in us is mutated. We, humans, try to be God instead of reflecting the image of the loving and other serving communion of the Trinity. Being diseased, we die and all of Creation is subject to this futility.
Because God loves the world and us each in it, God doesn’t abandon us to our diseased state of mind and existence. God sees us in our powerless state and has affected a cure, a judgement that cures, that heals, restores, and will create all things anew. One of the Persons whom God is became human. God the Son became this infant Jesus to be like a stem cell transplant to cure humanity. God put God’s very self into diseased humanity and indeed into physical matter to effect a cure of the disease of Sin that will eventually annihilate Death.
This stem cell transplant-like cure takes place in each of us as God has sent the Holy Spirit into each of us to heal us and transform us into the likeness of Christ. The Holy Spirit works to cause us to want to be healed, to want to unselfishly and unconditionally love each other, our neighbours near and far, and the Creation and thus foreshadowing the coming New Creation in which this disease called Sin is cured.
By the Incarnation of God as Jesus and the work of the Holy Spirit not only are we individuals becoming healed, we as humanity in toto are becoming healed. This is where Christian fellowship is important. Christian community embodies this world’s hope. Christian congregations are communities/relational networks in whom the image of God is becoming more apparent as we struggle to live together in a Jesus-like fashion. The command to “love your neighbour as yourself” isn’t simply some higher moral command to obey or else. It is what humanity healed looks like and since that is what is at work in us in Christ must we go and do likewise.
So, let us keep in mind that Christmas isn’t about the nostalgia and gift giving that is supposed to make us feel wonderful but mostly stresses us out. Christmas isn’t about the holiday. It is the staggering reality that God is healing his Creation in a very stem cell therapy kind of way. Ponder this. Amen.
