The Incarnation, wouldn’t you say, is more than a baby in a manger?To me the incarnation is God going the distance. The incarnation surely includes Bethlehem, but it also reaches as far as Golgotha too and out to places and hearts in between.
R. S. Thomas writes:
And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows; a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
…… ………..On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.
– RS Thomas, ‘The Coming’, in Collected Poems, 1945–1990
(London: Dent, 1993), 234.
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