Heaven Meets Earth

One of the prayers we hear at carol services reminds us that Christ’s incarnation “brings into one things earthly and things heavenly.” It is an insight deeply rooted in Christian tradition. Already in the second Christian century people were talking about the events of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection as a “recapitulation,” a summing-up of the entire human story. And the New Testament language in Romans 8 and Colossians 1 about how the reality of Christ affects the entire cosmos continued to resonate through the entire early Christian period. What happens when God becomes human is not simply an emergency plan to tidy up the forgiveness of our sins, but a matter of releasing us to be what we were made to be.