The King Who Came as Clay: Divine Weakness as Our Greatest Strength
A Christmas Meditation from Akasia
From my small desk in Akasia, Pretoria, the sounds of our neighbourhood tell a story. The persistent hum of generators during loadshedding, the distant cry of a hadeda ibis, the chatter of children playing in a street where the tar has long surrendered to potholes. This is the soil from which I write. It is into such a world—a world of resilience, contradiction, and deep longing—that the Christmas story speaks with startling force. We often picture God’s arrival with celestial fanfare, yet He chose a scandalous alternative: the fragile, crying form of a newborn. This was no strategic error, but a divine masterstroke. Before a hostile humanity could receive a Savior, it first had to feel the ancient, protective pull towards a child. In the infant Jesus, God disarmed our fortified intellects and spoke directly to our guarded hearts.
The Scandal of Particularity: Bethlehem in Akasia
The incarnation is the ultimate case of divine “contextualisation.” God did not send a generic, placeless decree. He embedded Himself in a specific family, a specific lineage, in the crowded backwaters of a specific town under Roman occupation. The theological term is the “scandal of particularity.” Why this teenage girl? Why that manger? Why a people under empire? For us in South Africa, a nation forged in the fires of colonialism and apartheid, this should resonate deeply. Our own theological giants, like Desmond Tutu, championed a gospel that rehabilitated African religious heritage, arguing that our ancestors had a genuine knowledge of God long before missionaries arrived. God honours the particular. He enters the specific ache of a people.
I see this in the recent, vital work at our own University of Pretoria, where a new Heritage and Museum Skills Programme is launched not in grand lecture halls first, but through deep community engagement. It seeks to restore stolen narratives and dignities, recognising that true healing is local, specific, and grounded. This is the way of the Incarnation. God, in Christ, did a “heritage project” on humanity itself, entering our specific story to restore our true identity as His children.
The Logic of Love: Disarming the Fortress of Self
Let us reason this through, for our faith is logical, even when it transcends logic.
The foundational argument of Christmas can be framed thus:
· Premise 1: A God of perfect love desires reconciled relationship with His creation.
· Premise 2: Humanity, in its pride, fear, and self-sufficiency, has fortified itself against God (intellectually, morally, and spiritually).
· Premise 3: A direct assault on these fortifications (by power, law, or overwhelming argument) would only trigger greater defiance, confirming humanity’s fear of a tyrannical God.
· Conclusion: Therefore, perfect love employs the strategy of strategic weakness—the Incarnation—to bypass the defended walls of the mind and appeal to the universal, protective instinct of the heart. A baby elicits care, not argument.
A common objection arises: “Is this not emotional manipulation? A divine trick?” Not at all. A trick deceives. This reveals. In the vulnerability of the Christ-child, we see the true heart of God. It shows that His ultimate power is not the power of coercion, but the greater power of invitation. As philosophers and theologians have long noted, the deepest truths about God and humanity are often revealed not through abstract propositions alone, but through story, symbol, and lived reality. The manger is God’s most profound philosophical statement about His nature.
Confronting Our Power Idols: The Manger vs. The Machine
Here in South Africa, we understand the seduction of false power. We see it in the heartbreaking headlines of gang shootings in our townships, where a twisted quest for respect and control through the barrel of a gun leaves orphans in its wake. We see it in the corrosive greed of state capture, which confuses leadership with looting. We see it in the brutal epidemic of gender-based violence, the ultimate cowardice of a corrupted strength preying on the vulnerable. These are the ways of a world that has never understood the message of the manger.
The Christmas story is a prophetic confrontation to all of this. It declares that true power, divine power, is manifest in service, in vulnerability, in the strength to restrain one’s own might. The child in swaddling clothes is a dismantling of the very idea that godhood is about being unassailable. In an African context, where community and interdependence (ubuntu) are cherished, the image of a God who needs a mother to feed Him, who needs a father to protect Him, is revolutionary. He sanctifies our human dependencies.
The Birth of a New Imagination
So, what does this mean for us, huddled around candles during loadshedding, navigating a complex, beautiful, wounded nation?
The Incarnation invites us to re-imagine everything.
· Re-imagine Power: True leadership is found in the towel of service, not the sceptre of dominance. Who in your community needs you to lay your power down for them today?
· Re-imagine God: He is not a distant CEO in the sky, but the One who knows the smell of hay, the chill of night, the grasp of a mother’s finger. Your daily struggles are not beneath Him; He has consecrated the mundane.
· Re-imagine Your Story: Your specific context—your struggles with unemployment, your fears for your children’s safety, your hope for a better South Africa—is the very place where the incarnate Christ meets you. He is in the township. He is at the water queue. He is with the lonely elder. As African theology insists, faith must speak to and from our lived experience.
This Christmas, let the image of the vulnerable God disarm you. Let it melt the cynicism that South African life can breed. Before Him, we are not called to be brilliant disputers, but humble guardians. We are asked to care for Him, and in doing so, we learn to care for what He cares for: the fragile, the poor, the forgotten, the specific, the particular.
The Almighty made Himself small so that our small lives could find cosmic significance. He became clay in a Potter’s hands, so that we, cracked vessels, could be remade. This is the wondrous, heart-stopping logic of Christmas. The war for our souls was won not with a sword, but with a baby’s cry. The Word became flesh, and moved into the neighbourhood. Even into ours. Even into Akasia.
Amen and Amen
https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/the-divine-disarmament/id1506692775?i=1000742660732
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