Descend to Reascend

Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. (Philippians 2:5-7) In the excerpt below, C.S. Lewis describes the humility involved in this incarnation of Christ.

In the Christian story God descends to reascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and prehuman phases of life; down to the very roots and seabed of the nature He had created. But he goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him. One has the picture of a strong man stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath some great complicated burden. He must stoop in order to lift, he must almost disappear under the load before he incredibly straightens his back and marches off with the whole mass swaying on his shoulders. Or one may think of a diver, first reducing himself to nakedness, then glancing in midair, then gone with a splash, vanished, rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water, down through increasing pressure into the deathlike region of ooze and slime and old decay; then up again, back to color and light, his lungs almost bursting, till suddenly he breaks surface again, holding in his hand the dripping, precious thing that he went down to recover. He and it are both colored now that they have come up into the light: down below, where it lay colorless in the dark, he lost his color too.

In this descent and renascent everyone will recognize a familiar pattern; a thing written all over the world. It is the pattern of all vegetable life. It must belittle itself into something hard, small and deathlike, it must fall into the ground: thence the new life reascends. It is the pattern of all animal generation too. There is descent from the full and perfect organism into the spermatozoon and ovum, and in the dark womb a life at first inferior in kind to that of the species which is being reproduced: then the slow ascent to perfect embryo, to the living, conscious baby, and finally to the adult. . . .Through this bottleneck, this belittlement, the highroad nearly always lies.

(C.S. Lewis, The Joyful Christian)

God becoming flesh is amazing and magnificent. The highroad for the follower of Christ is always this position of humility that is willing to stoop to stand, to fall in order to rise, to lose to gain, to submit in order to subdue, to be lowly so that God may lift us up. Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you at the proper time, . . . (1 Peter 5:6)