Are the Limits of My Body Bad?

Praise God for Mary

Modern doubts about the eternal Son of God becoming incarnate have put us into the habit of thinking of the virgin birth primarily as a statement of Jesus’s divinity. But for many early orthodox church leaders, the virgin birth highlighted the truth of Jesus’s complete humanity. Tertullian writes of the womb of Mary and the physical details of her pregnancy, with all the accompanying bodily functions and fluids. He writes of Mary’s real, actual pregnancy, of how she was “expanding daily, heavy, troubled, uneasy even in sleep, torn between the impulses of fastidious distaste and those of excessive hunger” because Jesus was growing in her womb.

Let us not miss the immensity of the claim here. The God of creation has done the work of re-creation by entering it, by becoming one with us. The Creator somehow “becomes” a creature. How? The way all humans come to be: born of a woman! The infinite is united with the finite in Mary’s womb. For the holy Son of God, “becoming” finite is not sinful but an appropriate aspect of creaturely existence and something he freely assumed in the incarnation.

The God we worship is not embarrassed by his creation; rather, he loves it, and he acts from that love. Tertullian rebukes those who are uncomfortable with God’s commitment to his human creation and his willingness to unite himself with it. Some want the benefits of the cross without the earthiness of the Son’s birth, but you can’t have one without the other.

Our ideas about our own bodies interact with ideas we have about Jesus’s body. We must grow comfortable with our creaturely existence, delimited by embodied living. God fully demonstrates his delight in our humanity, demonstrates that creation is lovely and lovable, in the event of Jesus’s very physical, very human birth. Tertullian doesn’t want us to miss the wonder of divine humiliation, for this points not only to the path of spiritual salvation but also to God’s affirmation of our created materiality. To miss this is to miss God’s plan for human flourishing.