Instead, he gave up his divine privileges;
he took the humble position of a slave
and was born as a human being.
When he appeared in human form [. . .]
(Philippians 2:7)
So I turned to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and fasting. I also wore rough burlap and sprinkled myself with ashes.
I prayed to the LORD my God and confessed:
“O Lord, you are a great and awesome God! You always fulfill your covenant and keep your promises of unfailing love to those who love you and obey your commands. But we have sinned and done wrong. We have rebelled against you and scorned your commands and regulations. We have refused to listen to your servants the prophets, who spoke on your authority to our kings and princes and ancestors and to all the people of the land.“Lord, you are in the right; but as you see, our faces are covered with shame. This is true of all of us, including the people of Judah and Jerusalem and all Israel, scattered near and far, wherever you have driven us because of our disloyalty to you. O LORD, we and our kings, princes, and ancestors are covered with shame because we have sinned against you. But the Lord our God is merciful and forgiving, even though we have rebelled against him. We have not obeyed the LORD our God, for we have not followed the instructions he gave us through his servants the prophets. (Daniel 9:3–10 NLT)
There is a common trope in certain kinds of literature where the king – or prince or princess – disguise themselves so they can wander among their subjects, unknown and without the trappings of their nobility to hide behind or keep them safe. Sometimes they switch places with a lookalike who lives at the opposite end of the societal ladder from them, ala Mark Twain’s classic The Prince and the Pauper, but often in these stories they simply put on an old coat, sneak out the back door of the castle, and wander the stalls of the market, relishing what it must be like to live free of the responsibilities intrinsically linked with their station in life.
In contrast, our King didn’t sneak out the back door of heaven to slum it with us for a few days before returning to the comfort and safety of his throne. He was one of us. He lived with us. He “moved into the neighborhood,” as Eugene Peterson puts it, and made his way in the world as a rabbi with no home to call his own.
Since the first betrayal in the Garden of Eden, God has been at the receiving end of some of the worst actions humanity has committed. We are liars, cheats, thieves, adulterers, racists, killers, and so much more and worse. During the thirty-three years of his life on Earth, Jesus saw all those vices, flaws, and broken aspects of our nature at eye level. For many of them, he was on the receiving end; it wasn’t just that he was betrayed, beaten, and killed in the last days of his life – it was very likely he was betrayed, mocked, lied to, cheated, and stolen from throughout his life.
Our God doesn’t know what it’s like to be us because he went on a mission trip one summer; he became one of us and experienced for decades all the highs and lows of what it means to be human.
The King of kings became a peasant. The Prince of peace lived as a pauper.
And the world is better for it. We are better for it, for if God had not given up “his divine privileges” and taken up “the humble position of a slave,” we would be still under the law, still living in a world that has not experienced the hope and redemption of the cross.
As Christians, we talk a lot about the incarnation – God becoming flesh and bone and living among us as fully human and fully divine. We even talk about needing to follow his example, to be incarnational in how we love our neighbors, entering into their suffering with them instead of simply showing compassion from afar. Yet, too often our idea of being incarnational is more akin to a prince sneaking out of the palace to be “with” the people for an afternoon rather than living among them as one of them.
Consider your attempts at living incarnationally. As you try to be like Christ in how you love others, what have you gotten right? How have you missed the mark?
Michael Benson is the communications director for the North American Baptist Conference.