I began last Sunday a sermon series on the Incarnation of Christ, which I continue today and will conclude next Sunday. It is a deep dive into the fact, revealed in Genesis 1.27, that humanity is made in the image of Christ, Who Himself is the image of the invisible God, as Saint Paul teaches (Col 1.15); knowing as well that, as Paul taught in Hebrews 13.8, that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever.” Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is He Who revealed to Moses that His Name is “I Am,” also translated as, “The Existing One.”

And where that led us is to the consideration that Christ, the I Am, the Existing One, same yesterday and today and for ever, always had a body–that His Nativity of the Virgin Mother was not the first instance of Christ having a human body. Paul calls Jesus Christ the Last Adam–last in the line of Adam (remembering that the word Adam means also humanity itself), so the finished revelation of humanity as a project of God that began in Genesis 1 with the making of the first, or initial humanity in Adam and Eve (Eve, whose name means “Life,” as she the mother of the living).

Thus, we can say, following the teaching of Paul and what is revealed in Scripture, that God’s project of making the human being is framed on one hand by the making of the First Adam, and on the other by the completion and perfection of humanity which is Jesus Christ on the Cross; that God’s project reached its completion and perfection is what Christ means when He says in one of His final words, “It is finished.” Finished, completed, fulfilled is the revelation of humanity in its fullest and most sacred form: Christ on the Cross as the divine embodiment of love: of everything that can be in this world, Christ is on the Cross.

So we have a line or lineage, a sacred lineage, of God’s project begun in Genesis and completed on the Cross (in John 19.30): First Adam (God’s first sketch of humanity) to the Last Adam (God’s full color and high-resolution image of Himself as Christ’s voluntary sacrifice: for Christ shows us what it is to be God by the way He dies as a human being; and God is love, and greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. God’s project begun in Genesis 1.27–“Let Us make man in Our image”–in the Father’s project of revealing Himself in Christ: of revealing Himself in Christ Who is the completed and perfected human image of God the Father Who is invisible.

And it is a project that we see unfolding in Holy Scripture. Saint Luke points to it in the lineage he provides in Luke 3.23-38. Luke gives it to us starting at Christ, and working backward through time. 77 names from Jesus of Nazareth (the Last Adam) back to the First Adam. It is appropriate to tell the lineage backward because Christ is the starting point for understanding humanity, because in Him humanity is revealed in its fullness. The image of Christ, however, is imprinted upon the entire lineage. Adam was stamped in the image of Christ, but so was Seth, his son Enosh, then Cainen, and onward many generations, through Noah, his son Shem and onward; through Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Judah and onward, through Boaz, Obed, Jesse, David, and onward–all are being made, being created, being fashioned in the image of Christ.

The names on the lineage of course are not the only holy people in all of human history: one of the holiest human beings in Scripture was Joseph, one of the twelve sons of Jacob, that is, of Israel. Perhaps more than any human described in Scripture, Joseph leads a holy life of moral purity, forgiveness, wisdom and leadership, faith in God’s promises, all of which are enabled by God’s favor and presence in his life. He is not listed in the holy lineage, and for that matter neither is Blessed Mary Theotokos, the Mother and bearer of God. Many other holy people are not in the lineage, because the point of Luke’s lineage is not to create a list of holy people (for some of the people on the list, starting with the First Adam, and including David and Judah and several more) had significant moral failings and serious sin). God’s project is His work in progress from Adam through many figures, and therefore through many eras and ages of time. God gives us freewill, which means that having the image of Christ in human bodies is not enough: there must exercise choices to achieve the likeness to Christ, to go along with the image. Because we are made in the image of Christ, we can speak of unity with Christ from our first breath of life. It is only through our choices to live according to Christ and seek to walk in His footsteps that we can conform to the likeness of Christ–that is, acting like Him, thinking like Him, and most importantly, loving like Him.

All of this is to say, yes, Christ did have a body before His nativity: all human beings, by virtue of being stamped in His image, are His Body, although quite imperfectly, and in many humans at best only barely. But it is always barely, and never less, never nothing. As I said last Sunday, Christ’s incarnation, His taking of a Body, can be seen to be happening in the making of man in the image of Christ. This making starts with the image of Christ in all human beings, and by the Cross this making is made available to us because we can choose to love God and love our neighbor, the more we choose to do, the more we accrue mercy in our flasks: blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy, taught our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, so that we can grow and be transformed by grace into the likeness of Him Who is the image of the invisible God, and Who lives and reigns with the Father, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

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