A Most Glorious Paradox

Our God is both infinite and incarnate. That He is both is an almost unspeakably glorious paradox. Do we realize that, not only 2000 years ago but at this very moment, God is incomprehensibly and unspeakably transcendent in the spiritual sense while at the same time fully manifest in a physical body in the Person of the risen Christ? Do we contemplate the sublime truth that He is an omnipresent Spirit Who, nevertheless, is also a material Presence in a specific place?

It is sometimes easy to forget that the same Jesus who walked the dusty paths of Judea two millennia ago did notwith His Ascension become a non-corporeal ghost. Our Savior now has a glorified body, but the “physicality” remains. Somewhere in His heavenly home Jesus Christ has sat down at the right hand of the Father. I do not believe that the term “sat down” is some kind of a metaphor. The Son is literally at the side of His spiritual Father in a material form. This form may indeed be one we cannot at this time fully comprehend but nonetheless it remains, at the least, one mode of the glorified Christ’s existence.

He did not become incarnate to then throw away that incarnation at the end of His time on Earth.

This is a biblical proposition. The Father is, indeed, a life-giving Spirit, but He not once disdains the physical or the physical realm in the Scriptures. The idea that the material is somehow specifically inferior to the spiritual in the eyes of God finds its origin not in the Bible but rather in the Neo-Platonic notions of the earliest Gnostic heresies. As C.S. Lewis once wrote referring to the Creator of all things “He likes matter. He invented it.” When the fullness of time came He chose for His Son to partake in a very particular form of the material, the human body. Nothing in the Gospels or any book anywhere else in the New Testament suggests that Jesus ever shed that Body. He now lives as a glorified expression of it but He remains embodied, He remains Incarnate.

Simultaneously God the Father and God the Holy Spirit exist in the realm of the purely spiritual, while staying in complete and perfect union with God the Son in His physical form. Could this not be the greatest divine paradox we can contemplate? It is an astonishing thought, one that truly lies beyond our ability to fully comprehend in any intellectual sense. The believer does much better at apprehending it with his or her own spirit. There has been at least one not fully expressible moment in my own meditative life when I have briefly but consciously sensed this particular aspect of the glory of God. It is a wondrous impression, one of the most profound I have known in my twenty years of faith. That moment, more than any proposition found in a theological or metaphysical text, is responsible for this essay.

Even as created, and fallen, human beings we ourselves know something of an internal wedding of body and spirit. In fact we do not ever precisely know where the dividing line is between the two. There is union between them, but also a separation, a distinctness. Both exist in a kind of harmony most fully, if not only, present in the redeemed person. This is perhaps a very, very faint echo of the aspect of the Trinity that we concern ourselves with here. It is a function of our being made in the image of God.

So what do we do with the reality that the divine appears both corporeally present in a fixed location while also being spiritually and infinitely present in all locations? I do not think we try to analyze it. Such analysis, especially taken to an extreme, only leads to intellectual paralysis. Instead we can add it to the myriad of reasons why we worship Him. The Christian Faith is full of such glorious paradoxes that, if we let them, call forth praise. This is just, in my opinion, one of the more profound.