Grant, we pray, that we may share in the divinity of Christ
who humbled himself to share in our humanity.
from the Collect for The Nativity of the Lord
At the Mass of the Day

The mystery of the incarnation we celebrate at Christmas, no less than the other core mysteries of the Christian faith beginning with the original Divine creative act itself, celebrates the extravagance of God’s love. Extravagance literally means “to wander beyond” (extrā– extra + vagārī– to wander). But how odd of God, how beneath and unfitting of God to exhibit such extravagance not with power, pageantry, and the usual accoutrements of royalty and privilege but rather in the subversive and ridiculous unbecoming inherent in the incarnation, that is, in and through the enfleshment of love.

The radical unbecoming of God is not seen solely in Jesus nailed at cross purposes with the powers and principalities and their self-serving agenda at the end of his life, but from the very beginning as seen in a remnant of one of the earliest Christian hymns set down in The Letter to the Philippians:

Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus,
Who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.
Rather, he emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
coming in human likeness;
and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself,
becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross (Phil. 2: 5-8).

The volitional self-emptying love of God (in Greek, kenosis) manifested in the relinquishing of Divine stature by Jesus and in his full and genuine acceptance of the totality of being human subverts human reason. It challenges the typical driven and upwardly mobile modus operandi of the dominant culture. It also reveals the great wandering-beyondness of God’s love for humanity. The extravagant inversion of the incarnation and its enigmatic power to consummate love in mutuality is captured in a tale told by the 19th century Danish existentialist philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard called “The King and the Maiden.”

There once was a mighty king of incomparable power and bearing. The king was feared by his enemies, and even statesmen within his realm trembled in his presence. But this king, despite his regal power and noble stature, was melted by love for a humble maiden who lived in a poor village in his kingdom. And this discrepancy created his predicament since he not only was the sovereign to this poor, lowly subject but an honorable one at that. He contemplated, ruminated, speculated, and agonized over how he could resolve his dilemma and declare his love for her.

He considered simply having her brought to the palace, crowning her head with jewels befitting a queen and clothing her in spectacular royal robes. He realized that if he did this she surely would not, in fact, could not resist him, since she was a subject and he the king. But he knew her lack of resistance could not be mistaken for love. And he wanted her genuine, non-coerced love. She would say she loved him, of course, but would she truly? Or would she live with him in fear, nursing a private grief for the life she had left behind? Would she be happy at his side? How could he know for sure? So the king rejected having the humble maiden brought to him.

Next, he considered the option of going to her. But he realized that if he rode to her forest cottage in his royal carriage, with an armed escort waving bright banners, that too would overwhelm her. He did not want a cringing subject. He wanted a lover, an equal. He wanted her to forget that he was a king and she a humble maiden and to let shared love cross the gulf between them. For it is only in love that the unequal can be made equal. So he ruled this option out as well convinced that he could not elevate the maiden without crushing her freedom or making her feel unworthy of his love.

Then he considered going to her disguised as a beggar. That way he would appear to be her equal and he could proclaim his love for her and she would not be overwhelmed by his regal state. But he realized if she discovered later he was actually the king and not a beggar that she would feel deceived and tricked into giving him her love. Her love would be meant for a beggar and he was really a king. So he gave up the idea of pretending to be a lowly beggar.

Finally, it occurred to him how to resolve the dilemma. He would not raise her up to his state nor disguise himself and pretend to be of her lower state. Instead, he would renounce his throne, step down from his sovereign duties, relinquish all royal privileges and rights, and freely choose to become a beggar. Then, with a worn cloak fluttering loose about him and clothed as her equal, he would approach her cottage to declare his love and to win hers.⊕

Understood theologically, Kierkegaard’s mythopoeic tale of kenotic Divine descent as embodied by Jesus is both a particularization and an extension of the one mystery: the extravagance and pathos of God’s love. It is hard to imagine a grander gesture of love than the unbecoming of God manifested in the taking on of human form in order to return human persons not only to the “one in whom they live and move and have their being” but also to their true selves held in the delight and mercy of God. It is doubtful one could imagine a more magnanimous show of love than this salvific act of solidarity, this life-giving expression of withness.1

Of all the titles ascribed to Jesus, is not Emmanuel, that is, God-is-with-us, the most treasured moniker and the one that has the most street cred among the anawim who are so dear to the heart of God?2 It is in and through the withness of God, not the achievement of human effort or the waving of a wizard’s magic wand or the incantation of a formulaic prayer of accepting Jesus as one’s personal Lord and Savior, that we experience the particularity and extravagance of Divine Love and receive not only the fullness of life but the summons of life as well.

Christmas is a mystery, a message, and a mission, namely, the incarnation of love. That’s it – in its ineffable fullness and in the scandal of the particular. It is the very aliveness of God poured out for others. And as with Miryam of Nazareth, its mystery and message are self-implicating. We are asked to be conduits of Christ’s presence, secret and at times not-so-secret agents of the incarnation of love.

Our mission – as noted above in The Letter to the Philippians – is to have among ourselves the same attitude that is also ours in Christ Jesus. Any time we incarnate love, enact kindness, listen generously, offer deep sympathy, embody compassion, give someone a glimpse of hope, wander beyond the propriety and expectations of the dominant culture to perform even the tiniest work of mercy or justice or hospitality, we participate in the mystery of the incarnation and the work of Christmas. Then our souls, in the words of Miryam of Nazareth, “magnify the Lord.” We make real and visible the scandalous vagrancy of Divine love, its inclusive largesse, and the healing power and blessed touch of Emmanuel, of God’s radical love as embodied withness which makes possible the oneness of all in the unending “festival of friends.”

⊕ This is my embellished telling of Kierkegaard’s story. I left out quotation marks so as not to interrupt the flow of the story but know that many of the sentences are Kierkegaard’s as they appear in his Philosophical Fragments, p. 31ff.

1 The word salvation comes from the Latin root salus meaning safety, health, well-being and refers to making whole.

2 In Hebrew, anawim (literally the bowed down) refers to the most vulnerable, marginalized, and dehumanized by oppression in a society that has largely demonized, discarded, or neglected them.