Behind Christmas lies what Christians in churches that still dare use long words know as the annunciation””the announcement of Gabriel to Mary that she would be with child of the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:26-31).
While Christmas reveals the Incarnation to the rest of us, it had already happened back then. Mary was the first to know; and her cousin Elizabeth’s unborn baby John (the Baptist) was the first to bear witness. His leaping in the womb was the first act of Christian testimony, a fetal response to a gospel first preached by an embryonic Jesus (perhaps two or three weeks old). As we read this narrative of theology from the womb, our minds turn to a near contemporary who would in due time electrify the ancient pagan world and lay the foundations of its collapse: Saul of Tarsus, also set apart from his mother’s womb (Galatians 1:15). Three unborn children in whose hands lay the destiny of humankind. And one of them was not merely the tiniest of humans, he was the cosmic creator, the Word by whom the Godhead has spoken into existence the vastness of time and space. And the One who will one day be our Judge.
I often wonder how many people who hear the famous Bible text that begins “In the sixth month” are aware of what is going on (Luke 1:26). It does not refer to the month of June, or for that matter to Elul, the Hebrew sixth month of the year. The reference is gynecological: the dating is by Elizabeth’s pregnancy. And it focuses us on the design of God to use the weak things of the world to confound the strong. The divine conspiracy is hatched within the walls of the womb.
Cameron brings up a good point for the Christians and bio-ethics folks to ponder: [i]God took human form; and he took it not simply as a baby, but as the tiniest of all human beings, a mere biological speck, so small and so undeveloped that it could be mistaken for a laboratory artifact, a research specimen, an object for human experimentation[/i]
When did God become God in the womb? Planned Parenthood of course tells prospective clients that abortion is just fine because that thing in the womb isn’t really human (and avoiding the subject of ultrasound images supports the fiction). The Gospel of Luke (Ch. 1, v35) makes Planned Parenthood’s fiction a little tougher to stand on. Since God the Father through the Holy Spirit made the “speck” to be God, seems we lowly humans are on the right track with Personhood Amendments to at least make the “speck” a person.