turn it inside out

Christmas is awesome.
I love Christmas.  I love Christmas music, and I love Christmas cheer, and "the best way to spread Christmas cheer is by singing loud for all to hear"- Elf.

I also love Christmas for the fact of little baby Jesus.  Yes, he is our savior and that is way totally awesome, but it is so much deeper than that.  It's ridiculous when you actually think about Christmas, like what went on.  It's not just that Jesus was born, but it's that Jesus was born... am I confusing you?
Let me put it like this, Jesus, Son of God and God incarnate, was born as a human.  That is impressive, and I think some get it, but many people don't get it.  Pithy phrases like "Jesus is the reason for the season" just don't capture it.   Most have this idea of Jesus being born in a barn to ultimately die for the redemption of humanity and this other idea of Jesus being one with the Father, and they never put two and two together.


This one thing has really been sticking out more and more to me lately, the sheer contradiction of Jesus a human and God a not-human.  When God comes into this world as Jesus, God essentially became not-God.  Think of it, God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, holy and glorious.  Jesus is finite in everyone of those areas, he had finite power, finite knowledge, finite presence, was born and raised not by a priestly family of affluence, but by an poorer carpenter family - there's is nothing holy and glorious about that.  The climax of the life of Jesus is even more ridiculous, he becomes sin; there is nothing more opposite of God than that.  God came to earth as Jesus to essentially not be himself, not just be not himself, but the polar opposite.

This is not to say that Jesus couldn't have been more like a deity.  Jesus most definitely had the capabilities, but Phil. 2:6 puts it like this "though being in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped."  INCREDIBLE!  Think of what Jesus could have been, but what Jesus was.  He could have called on the angels to rescue him, but he didn't.  He could have.... done well pretty much anything to make him more glorious, and yet he didn't.  He remained a humble servant of not only God, but of humanity... the most high God became the most humble of creatures, and not only that but served them and is the sacrifice for them as well.

I just think its incredible that God turned himself inside out for us.  He not only bent over backwards, but became not-God, he became opposite his nature and character just to rescue us.  Why?  It'd be like me becoming last so that I may be first, or leaving 99 sheep to find one.  It is illogical and stupid, and yet its what God has done.  God went off and got illogical; he became the very opposite of everything he was to open the gates of the kingdom for sinners like me.