God with us…really
May 26, 2009
Principal Donald Macleod on the incarnation:
Incarnation meant a whole new set of relationships: with his father and mother; with his brothers and sisters; with his disciples; with the scribes, the Pharisees and the Sadducees; with Roman soldiers, lepers and prostitutes. It was within these relationships that he lived his incarnate life, experiencing pain, poverty and temptation; witnessing squalor and brutality; hearing obscenities and profanities and the hopeless cry of the oppressed. He lived not in sublime detachment or in ascetic isolation, but ‘with us’, as the ‘fellow-man of all men’, crowded, harassed, stressed, molested. No large estate gave him space, no financial capital guaranteed his daily bread, no personal staff protected him from interruptions and no power or influence protected him from injustice. He saved us from alongside us.’
Donald Macleod, The Person of Christ, Contours of Christian Theology, Gerald Bray, ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1998), 180.
