What God Is This?

My wife and I think Rome is the greatest city on earth; we try to go every year. I have told my students that, if I ever won the lottery (unlikely, as I do not play it), classes would immediately be canceled on a permanent basis and I would be in Rome looking to buy property within twenty-four hours of receiving the winnings.

Among the many beautiful artworks in the city, one stands out for me in particular: the Pietà by Michelangelo in St. Peter’s. It is a stunning rendition of Mary cradling the crucified Christ in her arms. The power of the sculpture, intensified by the aura that it receives from being located in that church, cannot be communicated in words. It is a true gem. It is a reminder that Mary’s experience of Christ’s crucifixion would have been unique: She witnessed not only the death of her beloved savior but also of her beloved son. Her heartbroken love suffuses the work.  

But there is a mystery to the sculpture. Mary, if not a young girl, is still portrayed as a very young woman. And yet here she is, lovingly holding the body of her adult son. How can this be? Did Michelangelo get carried away on a flight of artistic fancy that caused him to forget basic issues of chronology? Perhaps. Yet the more plausible theory is this: The sculpture represents Mary at the age she was when she gave birth to Christ. Even then, she anticipated the suffering that would later be her own lot as a result of her son’s mission, as intimated to her by Simeon when she presented Christ in the Temple (Luke 2:35).

Understood in this way, the Pietà reflects an important truth: The Incarnation paved the way for the death of Christ. Thanks in large part to the centrality of Anselm’s arguments in Why God Became Man, this is unlikely to be news to most orthodox Protestants. If anything, we tend to instrumentalize the Incarnation and thereby reduce it to little more than the necessary precondition for Christ’s death: If he was never born as a man, he could never die. But there is more to it than that. The Incarnation itself is part of the humiliation of Christ. While the biblical narrative indicates that his public ministry begins at his baptism, it is at his birth—in fact, at the moment of his conception—that Jesus Christ’s saving work began.

When the Word was made flesh, the greatest miracle in history occurred. The one who created all things became part of his creation. The one who is omniscient became human and had to learn to grow in knowledge and stature. The one who gives life to all things and upon whom all things depend drew life from his mother’s milk, dependent for a time upon his earthly parents. That is a dazzling demonstration of the power of God, a power shown forth in weakness, and of the foolishness of God that so far surpasses the greatest of human wisdom.

We human beings are indeed remarkable. We have intellectual and technological powers found in no other creature. Like the God in whose image we are made, we can create great beauty, do great good, and speak great truths. Yet we are constantly tempted to worship the creation as if it were the creator, and to reduce that creation to the limits of our own wisdom. We make ugliness and call it beauty. We do evil and call it good. We speak lies and demand they be treated as truth. In short, we seek to make ourselves the measure of all things and our desires the measuring rod of what is wise. Yet the Bible tells us many times that it is the fear of God, not this exaltation of self, that is the beginning of wisdom.  

Job 28 sets this forth with a cascade of poetic images. Job acknowledges the beauty of creation and the stunning achievements of man. But the omnipotence of God puts even human beings into the shade. And in the Incarnation we see the pinnacle of this divine wisdom, when the Word becomes flesh, fearfully and wonderfully made, and the greatness of God is revealed by its very hiddenness in a tiny baby laid in a manger. And so begins the greatest chapter of the greatest story ever told.

We cannot imagine what thoughts passed through Mary’s mind as she contemplated her son and the inevitable future, when the sword of suffering would pierce her own heart. But as we reflect this Christmas on the baby in the manger, on the miracle of his Incarnation, of his birth, and of the subsequent road of suffering he was to tread, we can surely not help but ask ourselves: What God is this, that he would respond to creaturely rebellion not, as we would, with acts of retribution but by making himself subject to the consequences of such a rebellion, simply out of love for the rebels themselves? What manner of love is that? As we marvel at such things and our minds struggle to grasp even a fraction of the significance of what we see before us in the manger, we too might feel a frisson of reverent fear.

Carl Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.