Typically, when Christians talk about Incarnation, they are talking about the Incarnation of God in Christ - the belief that, in some mysterious way we cannot fully explain, the Divine and humanity found complete intersection in the person of Jesus. Traditionally, Christianity has defined the Incarnation as Jesus being both fully human and fully divine - which, to be honest, has never made sense to me. I’m a math guy. If you are 100% one thing, you cannot be 100% something else at the same time.
That is, unless those two things are not exclusive of one another. We have often thought of the ‘human’ and ‘divine’ categories as mutually exclusive, or even as total opposites. But perhaps one of the lessons we learn in Christ is that we are mistaken to think of those categories in that manner.
While I believe Jesus was a unique embodiment of God, I have come to believe that the embodiment of God in Jesus was more about a revelation of the Divine’s radical unity with humanity in general than it was exclusively about Jesus in particular. In at least some sense, Jesus shows us what it is to be fully human - and remarkably, when we live into the fullness of our humanity, we at the same time live into the fullness of the Divine Image in which we are made. Indeed, humanity and divinity are not opposites at all. When we fail to recognize the sacredness of the other, we are less apt to treat them as fully human; likewise, when we recognize the Divine Light that is in the other, and see that it comes from the same Divine Light that is in us, we see ourselves as part of one human family. The more fully human we become, the closer we reflect the Divine.
Richard Rohr speaks to this concept in talking about how God loves us by uniting with us: “God loves things by uniting with them, not by excluding them. Through the act of creation, God manifested the eternally out-flowing Divine Presence into the physical and material world. Ordinary matter is the hiding place for Spirit and thus the very Body of God. Honestly, what else could it be, if we believe — as orthodox Jews, Christians, and Muslims do — that ‘one God created all things’? Since the very beginning of time, God’s Spirit has been revealing its glory and goodness through the physical creation.... All things visible are the revelation of God’s endlessly diffusive spiritual energy. Once a person recognizes that, it is hard to ever be lonely in this world again.”
In other words, God is embodied in everything, everywhere. Including in me. And in you. And in your neighbor. Even the one you don’t like.
But by learning to recognize the Light even in the Darkness of the one we don’t like, we learn to be more human… and we reflect more fully the Divine. And in turn, we bring out the Divine in the other.
The Light shines in the Darkness, and the Darkness cannot overcome it. We experience Incarnation.