Every trade has its jargon. We can happily watch television without knowing about colour encoding, image resolution or frame rates. We can drive cars without understanding Bernouli's principle or the venturi effect. Christians can fall into the same trap as television engineers or car mechanics, and sometimes use language that outsiders do not understand - or use common words in unusual ways!
Incarnation is an illustration of this. To start with, the word does not appear in the Bible. It does not even exactly correspond to the Greek word in the original Nicene Creed. But this is splitting grammatical hairs. For incarnation literally means "becoming flesh", and the writers of the New Testament certainly asserted this. "The Word became flesh" (John 1.14).
Paul goes into greater detail. It takes careful reading to follow his closely-argued description in the first seven chapters of his letter to the Romans, about the weaknesses of the Old Testament law. But the eighth chapter is easier to read. Here, Paul concentrates on the positive aspect of God's relationship with us. "God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh..., he condemned sin in the flesh."
The root behind the word incarnation means "flesh" (think of carne in Italian). So what does flesh mean? How can Paul talk of "sinful" flesh?
It is easy to give a simple answer: we have a body and we have a soul. The body is made of flesh, the soul is made of spirit. But this is not the whole story. In the first place, the Hebrew writers of the Old Testament did not make this sort of clear-cut distinction. Their language was much more concrete: they talked of our breath, of our heart, of our flesh, even of our kidneys. And although the New Testament writers expressed themselves in Greek, they did not share the "dualistic" Greek view, that we consist of two parts, spirit (good) and flesh (evil). (Nor, indeed, did the Greek philosophers!)
In the Old Testament, "flesh" is part of our created nature, formed in God's likeness. Only occasionally is it mentioned that flesh is weak ("The Egyptians are human, and not God; their horses are flesh, and not spirit." (Isaiah 31:3)), never that flesh is sinful.
Paul shared this wholesome Jewish view. Whole books have been written about his use of the word "flesh" (not to mention "body", "spirit", "heart", "mind", "conscience", "soul" and "inner being"!). But Paul also used "flesh" as a shorthand way of saying "lower desires" - the classic example is "the works of the flesh" in Galatians 5 ("fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, 'and things like these'").
As the list makes clear, these are not bodily functions - some, like sorcery or envy obviously not, and others only when our minds are involved, too! Normally when Paul mentions flesh, it lacks this specialized sense of something base and sinful.
Jesus himself said that "the flesh is weak." Yes, but not sinful. It is what we do with it that may be good or may be sinful. This is part of the message of Christmas. In Jesus God shared - and shares - our weakness, the weakness of our human flesh. The way to life lies in sharing in the humility and service of the incarnate Christ. "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you." In the events at Bethlehem, God came to us, came to give us new life, and came to give us abundant life - in the flesh!
HD