The true shock and scandal of the incarnation lie in its particularity. Jesus doesn’t come to earth as a generic human. The Gospel is only good news because Jesus comes as a nobody, a powerless peasant in occupied Judea. Each of us is part of this particularity: the misshapen Christ, the brown-skinned Christ, the pregnant Christ, the prom queen Christ, the sexually trafficked Christ, the stuttering Christ, the anorexic Christ, the Alzheimer Christ, the bullied Christ, Christ with the MAGA hat, the queer Christ, the white supremacist Christ, the smelly homeless Christ, the hungry Christ.

Whenever and wherever specific human bodies are deemed “less than,” or “other,” or “not my tribe,” Jesus says “Here. Right here. This is my body.”

I wonder if we struggle against this astonishing specificity and spiritual implication in part because our culture doesn’t know what to do with human fleshiness. Our own, or anyone else’s.

Adapted from the words of Debie Thomas and Christine Valters Painter