Incarnation: Becoming the Living Word

Christmas: the season in the Christian calendar when we take a step back and consider the miracle of the incarnation. What does it mean for Almighty God to take on flesh and dwell among us? Incarnation is one of those theological constructs that can quickly lose us if we consider it in the abstract – which is ironic, really, because lived out, incarnation is all about making the theoretical a concrete, physical experience.

In my years as a high school literature teacher, I always looked forward to teaching plays. When it came time to teach Shakespeare, Gothe or Wilder, we’d push back the tables and tackle these works as a class because plays are not written to be read but to be physically embodied. Having students stand “on stage” and read each character’s lines was a first step in helping the class enter the text, but this often proved insufficient. Sometimes I’d have to interrupt the reading and ask the “actors” what their character was physically doing. What were they feeling? Students learned to pay attention to the italicized stage directions they were initially inclined to ignore. Putting actions to words automatically slowed down the speed of their reading. Adding emotion and body language shifted their perspectives on what was happening in the text. Though limited, our dramatic readings brought us a small step closer to understanding what the playwright was communicating. And if possible, I always tried to show clips of the text being acted on stage or screen to help the students encounter a fully embodied rendering of the work.

Pete Peterson, a playwright out of the United States, said in a podcast interview:

One of the magical things about theater to me is the way that, unlike with a novel, [where] the words are the final embodiment of that work of art, with theater, the words still have to be incarnated. They have to be given flesh and blood and three-dimensions in order to fully realize the script that’s been written.[1]

And Peterson is not alone in this understanding. Todd Johnson and Dale Savidge make a similar statement in their book Performing the Sacred: Theology and Theatre in Dialogue:

A play is a story incarnated in real space and time by real people. It is a human-to-human interaction that can often communicate something transcendent. The actors tell the story by becoming the story…The story is told in the messiness of an imperfect world…[2]

I’m intrigued by this concept of theater as incarnation – literally “embodiment.” Though perfectly literate, my students often struggled to really grasp what was going on in a script when they were just reading words off a page. They needed to see the words embodied – given life, emotion and physicality. Only then did they begin to grasp the full meaning, implications – and often humor – of the text. The problem wasn’t that the text was too hard; the challenge was that they were coming at it with an incomplete set of skills.

I wonder if that isn’t a bit like how we interpret scripture – especially the Old Testament? How often to do we approach the Biblical story with critical reading skills, ready to analyze the text for comprehension, but actually miss out on crucial aspects because we are focused on reading words off a page. I wonder if that’s one of the reasons why the world needed Jesus, the Word made flesh who dwelt among us?[3] Did we need to see God’s law – and His love – lived out to be able to imagine what it could be like? As Peterson observes later in the podcast:

for the first time in human history, you can walk around the law and see how it actually lives and moves in human space... God has written His play and now [through Jesus] it's being performed in some respects. And so the result of that is the apostles, they saw the word of God enfleshed in a way that nobody before and nobody since has.[4],

There is another interesting parallel I see here. Once a playwright has written a script, that play can be performed any number of times. And every performance – no matter how faithful the actors are to the words written on the page – will be different. It is those subtle variations that help to bring the play freshly to life each time it is put on. The differences don’t make the play “wrong”; they make it real. As believers, we’ve been given the script. We’ve even been given the gift of seeing it perfectly incarnated in the person of Jesus. And now we’ve been commissioned to ourselves step in and bring the script to life. As we are transformed, we too become examples of God’s word lived out in the physical world. Our performance will, of course, fall short of the perfect incarnation of Jesus, but like Him, when we live lives that embody God’s love and His law, we invite our audience to experience a fuller rendering of the story. And like an actor, we each bring something unique to this incarnation, something that the Lord uses to flesh out His word and bring it to life.

As you celebrate this Christmas, pause to consider how your teaching might be different if you were to approach it as an incarnation of God’s law and His love? What would change in the way your students encounter the Biblical text if they were experiencing it as a physical reality instead of just words on a page? Maybe incarnation isn't just an abstract theological term; maybe it is an invitation for us to put on the body of Christ and re-enact His story for all the world to see.

[Note: For a continuation of this topic, click here.]