Philip
Yancey, an American writer uses the following illustration to explain what the
‘incarnation’ means and why it happened. He writes:
I learned about incarnation when I
kept a salt-water aquarium. Management of a marine aquarium, I discovered, is
no easy task. I had to run a portable chemical laboratory to monitor the
nitrate levels and the ammonia content. I pumped vitamins and antibiotics and
sulpha drugs and enough enzymes to make a rock grow. I filtered the water
through glass fibres and charcoal, and exposed it to ultraviolet light. You
would think, in view of all the energy expended on their behalf, that my fish
would at least be grateful. Not so. Every time my shadow loomed above the tank
they dove for cover into the nearest shell. They showed me one “emotion” only:
fear. Although I opened the lid and dropped in food on a regular schedule,
three times a day, they responded to each visit as a sure sign of my designs to
torture them. I could not convince them of my true concern.
To my fish I was like God. I was too
large for them, my actions too difficult to understand. My acts of mercy they
saw as threatening; my attempts at looking after them even healing them, they
viewed as dangerous. To change their perceptions, I began to see, would require
a form of ‘incarnation’. In order to get through to them, I would have to
become a fish and “speak” to them in a language they could understand.
A human being becoming a fish is
nothing compared to God becoming a baby. And yet according to the Gospels that
is what happened at Bethlehem
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