The Word Is Still Flesh

The incarnation is an irrepeatable event, but its proleptic and eschatological reality still bears upon the very soil in which the cross of Christ is planted. Though the Word became flesh once and for all in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, that reality continues to reverberate through history. The Christ-event is not locked away in the past or sealed off in heavenly transcendence. It presses forward—into our time, our communities, and our relationships—calling forth new embodiments of divine love.

The church, as the body of Christ, cannot be any less enfleshed than the man from Nazareth. To confess that Christ has taken flesh is to confess that his body continues to take flesh in us. The church’s life, therefore, must have consequences in the life of the world. The Word became, is, and must still be flesh. Ecclesiology must also be flesh. We cannot reduce discipleship to a set of internal dispositions or purely spiritual ideals. Charity, justice, kindness, hospitality, inclusivity, and love are not abstractions reserved for another realm, nor are they qualities belonging to the so-called “invisible church” or to the private heart of the believer. They must take form in acts of compassion, in structures of justice, in relationships of mutuality, in advocacy, and in communities of belonging.

The incarnation reveals that God does not hover above history but descends into it, into the dust and struggle of creaturely life. As Mark Taylor asserts, "The way of the crucified God seeks God in earth’s humanity, which has been abandoned, rejected, and despised, the people who know life amid their struggle" (The Executed God, page 3). If the cross was planted in the soil of the world, then it is in that same soil that Christ continues to bear fruit. The life of the church must be a continuation of this divine descent—an embodied witness to the God who still meets us in the flesh of the poor, the suffering, and the marginalized.

To be the church, then, is not to escape the earth but to descend into it (the allusion to burial here is intentional), to enter it more deeply, with the compassion of the One who entered it as its Redeemer. The Word who became flesh still seeks flesh. The Christ who entered history still insists on transforming ours through communities that practice grace, through hands that serve, through love that refuses abstraction, through the broken body and shed blood, through bread and cup. 

The incarnation is complete in Christ. The church, as Christ’s body and as true and concrete humanity, exists by grace as the location of God’s arrival, bearing God’s image—which is to say, God’s justice, justification, freedom, vindication, and reconciliation—within the life and soil of the world God so loves.