Eskēnōsen (2 of 2)

He was hungry. He was tired. He learned. He grew in wisdom, Luke writes, and in stature and in favor with God and man. The human nature he assumed was real human nature, including its capacity to develop. But the divine nature he never set aside. The two natures coexist in one person, and the operations of each are distinct, even though the person who operates them is one. He could weep at the tomb of Lazarus and also know that Lazarus was about to be raised.

The point for our purposes is that the descent is real. The mass-bound human being is not encountering a god who has stayed at a comfortable altitude. The mass-bound human being is encountering the very Logos through whom all things were made, now standing in the dust, hungry and tired and weeping, having genuinely entered the condition that the asymptote describes. The constant has entered the sequence. The eternal-now has assumed a body that grows and learns and eats and sleeps.

The engineer's instinct here is to register the specificity of the engineering choice. There were other ways the divine could have engaged human beings. God could have spoken from a cloud. God could have sent an angelic representative. God could have provided revelation through prophets. He did all of these things, and each was real. But the Incarnation is none of these. It is the load-bearing solution. The Creator does not stay above the asymptote and reach down. He crosses it. He enters it. He enters the condition that bound us.

When Jesus eats, He is not condescending to a body he privately despises. He is showing what eating actually is — the participation of the embodied image-bearer in the gift of created food, an act of dependence that is also an act of communion. When He sleeps in the boat while the storm rages, He is showing what rest looks like in a human being whose trust is grounded in the Father. When He weeps at the tomb of his friend, He is showing that grief in an embodied image-bearer who loves is not a defect to be transcended but a measure of how deeply love has rooted itself in flesh.

He is not teaching these things with words. He is teaching them by doing them. The fully human life, lived in unbroken communion with the Father, turns out to be the disclosure of what human life was always meant to be. Not less embodied. Not less temporal. More so, because every act of eating and sleeping and weeping and walking is now performed by someone whose human nature is in perfect alignment with the divine will that created it.

Then the Transfiguration, briefly. On a mountain recorded in Mark 9, Matthew 17, and Luke 9 — the disciples Peter and James and John see Jesus undergo a momentary unveiling. His face shone like the sun, Matthew writes. His clothes became dazzling white. Luke records that the appearance of his face was altered. Peter, looking back on this event years later, writes in his second letter that they were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

The Transfiguration is not Christ becoming what He was not. It is Christ being seen, briefly, as what He had been all along. The veil of ordinary appearance lifts and the disciples see that the body in front of them — the body of the man they have walked with for three years — has been all this time the dwelling place of unmediated glory. The tent has always contained the kavod. The flesh has always been the glory's residence. They have been walking with the Tabernacle.

This is what eskēnōsen meant from the beginning. Not a temporary visitation. Not a borrowed costume. A real indwelling. The Word genuinely became flesh and genuinely dwelt among us. And dwelt is the right verb. He took up residence. He moved in. He has not moved out since. The risen and ascended Christ remains incarnate. The flesh He assumed has been carried into the eternal presence of the Father and is, at this moment, the meeting place of God and humanity at the right hand of the throne.

In the next chapter we follow that descent to its deepest point. The flesh the Word assumed will be broken. The body the glory inhabited will be crucified. The descent that began at the manger will end at a cross, and from there it will keep descending into death itself.