In the Creed we tell of our belief in God's only Son, Jesus, the Messiah, whom we worship as truly God, begotten before time began. And then the scene shifts to our own world, our planet, to Mary, to Pontius Pilate, to a time when Rome was conquering the Gauls, to a corner of its empire at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean. What a comedown!
How much of a comedown it was depends on your point of view. We can remember, as Paul told the Philippians, that Jesus "emptied himself, taking the form of a slave" (2:7). Or we can take the opposite, bottom-up, view, that "the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory." (John 1:14). Heaven and earth were linked - in the words of St Athanasius, "God became human, so that humans might become God". A comedown for God, a come-up for us.
The words down and up are figurative, of course. When we say that Jesus "came down", it is easy to think of some kind of space-flight, with shepherds gazing at angels in the sky and wise men following stars. But people we look up to are not necessarily taller than us, and a good teacher who brings things down to our level has not necessarily come from the attic!
The Creed declares that his happened "for us and for our salvation" (older English versions say "for us men" - today we lack an easy way to translate the concept of humanity as a whole, but we should remember that "we" are not just the congregation reciting the creed, God's chosen people, the Church, but all humanity - Christ lived, died and rose again for all!).
And the word "salvation" implies that we needed to be saved - from sin, from darkness, from ourselves. The name "Jesus" itself means "God saves."
John's gospel tells us that the Word "was made flesh". The Creed uses a slightly more complicated word, "was incarnate." The meaning is the same. It is all too easy to think of Jesus as a sort of supernatural, superhuman being. But he must have stumbled on rocks and bled, he must have suffered from the common cold, must have had the same physical needs as we do, must have suffered the same temptations, even if he resisted them. Sharing our nature, he knew our sufferings, could suffer with us, and could save us from them. The Creed does not go into detail as to how this happened, and we do well to note this - the disputes at the Reformation and later about the precise mechanics of how Jesus saved us through his death and resurrection are irrelevant: what matters is that we are saved, body, mind and all.
Nor does the Creed go into the mechanics of Mary's pregnancy. The original text has been difficult to translate. The old Prayer Book follows the Latin translation, and says Jesus "was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary", the International Commission which produced revised texts in the 1960's proposed "by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary", and now we have "was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary" - a better translation perhaps, but no clearer. Yet we should remember that in the Incarnation, God the Holy Spirit and Mary's body both played their part. And that we too, stand at the boundary of two worlds, the earthly and the eternal. May we never forget that God and humanity met in Jesus Christ.
HD