Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Image credit: Gage Skidmore
There are some great lines in Christmas carols. My favourite is in ‘Joy to the World’, where we’re told that Jesus ‘came to make his blessings flow, far as the curse is found’. That’s a great, one-line summary of why Jesus came into the world. It would be hard to find anyone who would disagree with the statement that the world is not as it should be. Why is that the case? Some would say lack of education. Others would say inequality. Still others would say religion. The Bible’s explanation is that this world has been under a curse ever since humanity’s rejection of God back in the Garden of Eden. It was the effects of that curse that Jesus came to reverse.
Other carols are more problematic, however. ‘Silent night’? – no, it definitely wasn’t! ‘No crying he makes’? – real babies cry. ‘We three kings?’ – they weren’t kings and we're’ not told how many there were. ‘Mary, did you know’? Yes, yes she did. And as for the little drummer boy…
Another problematic line is from a carol originally entitled ‘Hark how all the Welkin rings’. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s now known to us as ‘Hark! The Herald Angels sing’. The line in question reads: ‘Veiled in Flesh, the Godhead see’. It’s saying that in Jesus, we see God, albeit veiled. Surely it should be the opposite, however: Jesus was not God veiled – but God revealed.
He is, as the Bible says elsewhere, ‘the image of the invisible God’ (Colossians 1:15). John’s gospel begins by telling us that while ‘No one has ever seen God, the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known’. Jesus’ own testimony is that he is the Revealer of the Father: ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9).
As someone has put it: ‘The Godhead was not veiled in flesh. The Godhead was revealed in flesh. God makes himself known, not hidden, in flesh’
Why does any of this matter? Because if Jesus is the revealer of God, then if we want to know what the invisible God is like, we need to look at Jesus.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was a major figure in the New Atheism movement, along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. The latter once described her as the ‘the most important public intellectual probably ever to come out of Africa’. Last month, she announced her conversion to Christianity. Brought up as a Muslim, she became a prominent critic of Islam, opposing forced marriage, honour killing, child marriage and female genital mutilation. In a recent interview, she said ‘the god I grew up with was a horror show’. Her therapist once asked her what she thought that God should be like if he existed; the answer she came up with was Jesus Christ. Ali says that she once hated God – but the ‘god’ she hated was not like Jesus. Similarly, many people today reject a ‘God’ who is nothing like Jesus. If Jesus is the one who reveals God however, he must be our starting point in coming to see what God is like.
Author and Seminary President Michael Reeves used to have an almost physical reaction to the word ‘God’. It was not a word that brought him any ‘comfort and joy’ (to quote another carol). He describes an experience surely not unique to him:
‘I found myself interested in heaven, interested in salvation, even interested in Jesus, but not attracted to God. I longed to escape hell and go to heaven, but God’s presence was not the inducement. Quite the opposite: I would have been far more comfortable with a Godless paradise’.
So what changed? Through reading some of the great writers of church history, Reeves came to realise that ‘there is no God in heaven who is unlike Jesus’. The great truth of the incarnation is not God veiled in human flesh – but God revealed in human flesh.
And what sort of God does Jesus reveal? A good of perfect compassion, perfect tenderness, perfect justice, perfect love. A God who we were created to be like – but are very unlike.
Jesus’ coming into the world is significant because of how the story would end: with his death on the cross. Far from being a tragic accident, his death was the very reason he came – so that the sin that separates us from God could be dealt with. Truly that is ‘glad tidings of great joy!’
Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 21 December 2023
Another take on the same theme, but aimed at a different audience, appeared on Gentle Reformation earlier this week.