Jesus, the eternal God-Man from Heaven, who since the dawn of time had revealed himself and the will of his Father to the prophets only, swaps his glorious and indestructible Heavenly body for a frail, mortal one like ours and is seen, heard, touched and known by the masses.
Jesus did what we could never do, that is to live the perfect life. The kind of life that would get the Heavenly Father's 100% approval with no caveats, no ifs, no buts, no spin and no exaggeration. He lived the life that we could never live, despite all its inherent pressures and stresses, temptations and sufferings. He proved faithful to the will of his Father to the end of his earthly life - to an excruciating, abandoned and accursed death. A death which soaked up all of the Father, Son and Spirit's righteous anger against all human wickedness and treachery and the subsequent curse that this wickedness had brought on the whole cosmos.
Jesus was never sent, only to be a good moral example for the world, our need and his mission was so much greater than that (as things like the Copenhagen summit illustrate so well). He is the first of a new humanity. Not the human equivalent of a software patch or upgrade, but a whole new kind of human - he was and is the true human. One that we could never create, whether artificially or naturally. Since that first rebellion, we have all been and all are frauds and counterfeits, all living on borrowed time.
Christmas, that is Jesus Christ, is the ultimate sneak peak, the spoiler, as to what the new humanity will be like.
Through this true human - Jesus, the God-man - the God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in staggering kindness, offers love and the hope of reconciliation to the whole world.
Jesus came to share in our frail humanity, so that all those who humble themselves before him, need not eternally feel the full force of his righteous anger, but rather, might one day fully inherit his true, pure and eternal humanity, and know friendship with the Father like he does, and freedom from pain, sorrow, disorder and death.
Moreover, not only true Christians, but the whole universe now lives in the hope born from that appearing 2000 years ago.
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