Perfection and Weakness Fused Together

We've all heard the Christmas story. So much that it seems like it's almost lost its sense of miraculousness. God really did come down to earth as a human.

 I love the way Tosca Lee* puts it in her book “Demon: A Memoir.” Hearing this familiar story from a demon's point of view puts it in a whole different light, showing us just how amazing it really was. But enough said. I'll let her words speak for themselves.

(The “she” is Lucian, the demon, and the “I” is Clay, the person Lucian is telling the story of the world to. Lucian is speaking here.)

        “Had it not been for the identity of the baby, it would have been an otherwise unremarkable night, and your polite 'Greensleeves' would have been an appropriate soundtrack, after all. But it wasn't an ordinary baby. It wasn't an unremarkable night.

        “There had been rumors. Prophets ranting about saviours.” The demon's cup of tea sat steaming in front of her, neglected. “Then the news came: A messiah was imminent.”

        “How did you feel about that?” I asked.

        She folded her hands on the table and smiled. “Oh, I wanted to see it! After all, it had to be a Herculean job, being a savior; it didn't seem possible for one man. And we began to speculate among ourselves which of his favorites El would raise up. Perhaps he'd be a man of breeding and education. A leader of men. A great general – a soldier, in very least.”

        “But this guy in Bethlehem… ”

        “A carpenter's kid born of a teenage pregnancy.” She covered her eyes with her hand and shook her head. “It was so ridiculous. El was making a clay child in the womb of some ordinary girl with a boring name. An unremarkable virgin – and not even the best-looking girl I'd ever seen – pledged to mary some carpenter or another in some insignificant town. Suffice it to say, it didn't look promising.” I felt now a strange tension in her, a tautness.

        “Finally we realized El's plan was far more extravagant and unimaginable than anything we could have fathomed. And as I huddled on the periphery of that night, I saw a shot of light, heard the heralding Host. The pulse of the world fell silent, one sound only filling the void where that deafening announcement had been: the first wail of a newborn human.”
        She lowered her head. “Had I blood, it would have frozen in my veins, for I recognized the voice in that human cry. And the knowledge of it rushed upon me all at once: Elohim, Creator Almighty, had sent that part of himself, the very part that had spoken the words for the forming of the cosmos before my inception, had planted himself in the womb of an insignificant girl. He had arrived in person. Do you understand? Flesh! He had taken on flesh, true flesh! The sentence of humanity. God himself in the clay body of man.
       “Here, suddenly, was the unfathomable combination: the perfection of El in a fallible mud body. Perfection and weakness fused together.”

Unfathomable. Yes, it was. Let us treat it as such!