By Randall Smith
Many have likely seen the amazing photos from the James Webb Space Telescope showing thousands of galaxies. Not just stars, mind you, but galaxies, each of which is filled with trillions of stars. Now imagine those thousands upon thousands of galaxies condensed down into an infinitely dense point the size of - nobody really knows - but let's say, the size of a baseball. Something like this is the picture we have of the Big Bang Theory of the beginning of our universe. It may or may not be what actually happened, but we can conceive of it as a possibility.
I mention the possibility merely as a way of wrapping our minds around what is involved in the Incarnation. The Creator of all those galaxies and every atom and quark in them - the infinite Source of the Being and Goodness of whatever exists - constricted Himself down to the size of a baby - to the size of an embryo. In the movie Aladdin, the genie mentions the paradox of having "phenomenal cosmic power" in an "itty bitty living space." He's not even close to the greatness of the power or the smallness of the space.
In Philippians 2:7, Paul says that Christ "emptied himself" of his divinity and took on our humanity. Do we quite understand how radical a claim that is? The Incarnation isn't like Apollo or Zeus appearing to someone or taking control of a human body for a while. Those "gods" are localized entities, not as vast as the entire universe. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob - God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - is more vast than the universe itself.
All that is hard enough to get our heads around. Actually, I don't think we can ever really get our heads around it. We don't even know what "dark matter" is, or what's inside a black hole, or why the Higgs Boson does what it does. Whereas God not only knows those things completely, He made them, and they only continue to exist because He is keeping them in existence. The difference between that "mind" and our minds is like the difference between a cherry tomato and the entire galaxy - only now you need to multiply that difference by the biggest number you can think of, and you'd still not be close.
Okay, so now try to get your head around the notion that it's that God who actually loves us. Not only does He take notice of us, like you might notice a moderately interesting pebble at the beach, which would be startling enough. There has to be more interesting stuff to gaze at in the universe than me. There are more interesting things on this desk than me. But God not only notices, He actually loves us.
How do we know that? Why would we think that He even cares? The laws of quantum physics don't care about the world or you. They just are. Why would anyone come to the rather startling conclusion that the universe is a gift of boundless, infinite love? It's not immediately apparent just from looking at things in the world, so we should be very understanding when some of our fellow citizens find it difficult to believe.

Christians believe that the evidence for this all-pervading creative love is found in the Incarnation. A God bigger than we can even imagine chooses to become incarnate in an embryo smaller than we can see with the naked eye. It certainly turns everything upside down. Pope Benedict XVI wrote somewhere that this is like balancing the well-being of the entire cosmos on the head of a pin.
The most powerful force in the entire universe became incarnate in perhaps the most powerless thing we can imagine. Is there anything more powerless than a baby? God has not only "taken on our humanity," He has taken on our humanity at its weakest and most defenseless. And then, He goes even further and does the one thing the classical Greek gods could never do: die. He dies for us, taking on Himself both our sin and our death to vanquish both. Again, we need to be understanding of people who can't quite wrap their heads around this. It's a lot.
But we should at least be clear about this. If Christ is not ...

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