The paradox of the Incarnation

Advent is a time for meditating on the Incarnation—on what it means for God to become human in Jesus of Nazareth. Kathleen Norris writes in Amazing Grace: a vocabulary of faith of the two extremes we tend toward in thinking of the Incarnation,

I began to realize that one of the most difficult things about believing in Christ is to resist the temptation to dis-incarnate him, to not accept him as both fully human and fully divine. The normal human tendency is to succomb to the errors that Gregory Wolfe, the editor of Image magazine, delineates in his recent book "The New Religious Humanists:"

"When emphasis is placed on the divine at the expense of the human (the conservative error), Jesus becomes an ethereal authority figure who is remote from earthly life and experience. When he is thought of as merely human (the liberal error), he becomes nothing more than a superior social worker or a popular guru."
The orthodox Christian seeks another way, that of living with paradox, of accepting the ways that seeming dualities work together in Jesus Christ, and in our lives.

The gift of Advent is to accept the paradox of the Incarnation in recognizing that Jesus was and is both human and divine and so the Lord whose coming we anticipate knows our hopes and fears, our joys and sorrows, better than any distant divinity and is more truly present to us and able to save us than any human, no matter how exemplary.