God’s Vulnerable Love

Christopher J. Domig, “Birth” (2022).

Utterly vulnerable: that's the character of God's love in the Incarnation. 

Frightfully vulnerable for nine months in the womb.

Vulnerable in the dramatic exit from Mary's uterus.

Vulnerable in the inevitable exposure to earth's elements.

Vulnerable in his dependence upon his mother's milk and maternal care.

Vulnerable in his total reliance upon his adopted father's provision and protection.

Vulnerable to the misapprehension of shepherds and to the gossip of town folks.

There is nothing self-protective or self-assertive about Christ's embodied love.

The moment he assumes our human nature, he chooses to become vulnerable to bodily life and bodily death.

His is a body, as Paul Griffith puts it, that is “born into the world in a flood of blood and water and mucus and agony, as all babies are.”

In this way his body comes to us as a wholly vulnerable body: vulnerable to the vicissitudes of infancy, vulnerable to the injury of his friends, vulnerable to the insults of strangers, vulnerable to the cruel powers of Rome, vulnerable to the touch of the "clean and unclean" as well as to those who get it and those who don't.

This is the good news of the Incarnation, among other things: that in becoming vulnerable for our sakes, we too can find ourselves wholly loved by God in Christ in our own terrifying vulnerabilities—in our own weaknesses, our own insecurities, our own anxieties, our own fears of being handled without care.

Chris Domig captures a picture of such vulnerable love in his painting, "Birth." The pastor-poet Drew Jackson gives voice to the vulnerable love Mary in his poem, "Theotokos (God-Bearer)," shared below, from his marvelous book God Speaks Through Wombs.

And my own Prayer for Christmas Eve attempts to name such vulnerable love so that we can pray our hearts into this reality of divine love, all loves excelling, to borrow Charles Wesley's language.

May it be so, for you and for me.

Amen.

"Theotokos (God-Bearer)," by Drew Jackson.

Young. Brown.

From that side of town.

And now

with a baby

on the way.

You call her blessed?

I've heard her called worse things.

   Thot

   Ho

   Bust-down

   Tramp

No wonder she is troubled 

by this greeting.

But they can't see

what You see.

What do they know?

She is holy.

Theotokos.

Overshadowed.

The Spirit hovers,

and she is covered.

Ready to birth

new creation.

Delivering us

salvation.