(My apologies; I mistakenly posted twice on the same day!)

AS I WRITE this, it is nearly Easter, the day we remember and celebrate together the resurrection of Jesus. The resurrection is, after all, the cornerstone of our hope as believers. Death is not the end of Jesus’ story and it won’t be the end of ours. Every moment of newness and transformation that we enjoy by the Spirit now, in this life, should be the constant reminder and sign of the resurrection life that is to come.

For the moment, though, I want to turn our attention in a different direction. Why do we celebrate Christmas? The secular, “happy holidays” answer is that it’s a season of gift-giving and goodwill. And to be sure, that’s nothing to scoff at in our tense and divisive world. If people can be inspired to give their anger and resentment a rest for a few days, I’m all for it.

To believers, of course, Christmas means much more, because it commemorates the birth of our Savior. That’s the part our kids understand: it’s a birthday party for baby Jesus! But I do wonder whether we as adults sometimes skate too quickly past the miracle of Christmas as we look toward the miracle of Easter. Jesus didn’t just come to die, he came to live, to show us what it means to live in a way that was completely in tune with his Father. To do this, the eternal Word of God had to become a human being, born as a helpless baby needing the care of his parents.

Right now, I’m visiting my kids and grandkids. The youngest one is still a baby, and I spend a good chunk of time each day holding and playing with her. Somehow, I just can’t help kissing the top of her little head. Do you remember what that’s like? Most of you have probably held a baby at some point, perhaps even raised one or more of them to adulthood, seeing them through all the ups and downs of childhood and adolescence.

So think for a moment about the baby you held in your arms, the one who cooed and smiled at you and then spit up on your Sunday clothes. A baby, small and helpless like all other babies. Like the one Mary cradled. Imagine: this is God in the flesh you’re holding. God.

That’s the miracle of Christmas, what the church knows as the Incarnation. If you really think about it, it’s enough to give you vertigo.

AS WE’VE SEEN, John tries to comfort a community that has been rocked by the departure of some of their members who held some aberrant beliefs and tried to convince others to do the same. The apostle essentially tells his readers that the schismatics, that is, the people who left, were never truly part of the fellowship to begin with, and their departure was probably inevitable. Although he doesn’t come straight out and say it, the implication of his language is unmistakable: he considers the schismatics to be liars and even antichrists, or enemies of Christ. Why? Because they reject the truth about Jesus. Here again are his words:

Who is the liar? It is whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a person is the antichrist—denying the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also. (1 John 2:22-23, NIV)

But what, exactly, were they denying? Let’s pause for a moment and remember that while we may take the gospel message and the story of Jesus for granted, no one of John’s time could. The story contradicted what the Jews expected of their Messiah, and bore the indelible stamp of a shameful death on a Roman cross. There were lots of things in the story, in other words, that people might find counterintuitive or distasteful, lots of things to reject, deny, or explain away.

Again, reading a letter written to someone else is like listening to one side of a phone conversation; we have to guess at the full conversation. John leaves a lot of things unsaid because he doesn’t need to say them. But does he leave any clues as to what the schismatics believed? We may have a hint in chapter 4, when he uses the word “antichrist” for the fourth and final time in this letter:

This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world. (I John 4:2-3)

We will come back to these verses later, when we reach chapter 4. For the moment, though, these verses suggest that the people who left the fellowship may have refused to acknowledge that Jesus had “come in the flesh.” It’s possible, of course, that this might mean that they refused to acknowledge the existence of Jesus, period — but if that’s the case, why were they part of the community in the first place?

The more likely meaning is that they denied the Incarnation. Indeed, this fits with what we know of some of the heresies in the early church. Various forms of Gnosticism, for example, taught that the physical world was evil, leading some to believe that Jesus could not have been truly human, but only appeared to be so, like some conjurer’s illusion. Alternatively, some affirmed that Jesus was a flesh and blood human being, but that “Christ” was a spiritual being that came upon him at his baptism and then abandoned him on the cross. I mean, come on — God can’t be crucified, right?

These may sound like strange ideas. But again, to be fair, who but God could come up with the Incarnation? I’m guessing that whatever the schismatics believed, it made perfect sense to them. The problem is that what they believed wasn’t true, they were trying to persuade others to their point of view, and it was causing conflict.

The gospel, in other words, is not just that Jesus died for our sins — it’s also that Jesus lived in the flesh, as one of us, showing us what a godly life could be. As Rachel Held Evans has written, “Jesus is what the living, breathing will of God looks like.” So think for a moment about all the worldly struggles John has already pointed to in this chapter, all the trials and temptations that come with living in these bodies of ours. What difference can or should it make to us that Jesus, the Son of God, lived a fully human, bodily existence as we do?