Manifesting Christ

"[In baptism, t]he Christian becomes a mirror image of Christ. Christ was divine and took on the human body; the Christian is embodied and takes on the divine life."^[1]

Richard Valantasis

The three seasons of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany all center around the doctrine of the Incarnation when Love became embodied, real. In refuting heresies that arose at the time, the early church convened at least three ecumenical councils to work out acceptable language for this central doctrine. If you would like to read over the Council of Chalcedon’s definitive statement on the Incarnation, the compilers of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer included it in the Historical Documents of the Church on page 864.

But that’s pretty dense language, isn’t it? While the Eastern Church believes the Incarnation is a mystery and something that should be pondered and prayed, we in the Western Church merely recite the Nicene Creed and leave it at that. Both of these approaches are probably the reason most of us don’t fully understand the implications of this doctrine for us and our own lives.

Scripture has long urged us to be imitators of Jesus Christ (Ephesians 5:1) or to have the same mind as Christ (Philippians 2:5). Even Jesus told His disciples to model Him in washing the feet of others (John 13:15). But how is it really possible for us to imitate or model our lives after the Incarnate God?

The birth, life, suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth give us a “revelation of the nature of God.” Jesus lived a full and perfect human life and the testimony and evidence left behind for us from his followers gives us “knowledge on which we base our religious faith, our attitude to and our interpretation of the whole of reality.”^[2]

If, as Dr. Valantasis asserts in the quote above, we are to mirror Christ, then it is from our baptism through which we are empowered to do so. Through our baptism, we are united with Christ as we share His death and resurrection (BCP 306). While God descended into a human body to become incarnate, through our baptism, we ascend to divinity by becoming one with Christ Jesus. This might make some of us feel quite superior. We should, instead, be humbled by the “special mission of manifesting the divine life”^[3] in how we live, how we treat our neighbors, how we minister to “the sick, the friendless, and the needy.” (BCP 392)

The church celebrates Christ’s manifestation to the world in the season of Epiphany. The question for us is, how do we manifest Christ to the world with our own lives?

[1] Richard Valantasis, Centuries of Holiness: Ancient Spirituality Refracted for a Postmodern Age (New York: Continuum, 2005), 39.

[2] David A. Pailin, “The Incarnation as a Continuing Reality,” Religious Studies 6 (1970), 306-307. Cited in Astley, Brown and Loades’ Christology: Key Readings in Christian Thought (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 71.

[3] Valantasis, 39.