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1.1 INCARNATIONAL COMMUNICATION

To incarnate—to embody in flesh;

to put into a body, especially a human form.

Providential Positioning

Providential positioning refers to movements by God’s spirit whereby human beings (unbelievers as well as believers) are placed or moved into particular positions and situations to accomplish some aspect of God’s work in the world. The biblical record draws attention to such movements at work in the lives of Moses, David, Joseph, Daniel, Esther, Ezra, and Nehemiah as well as in the lives of an Egyptian pharaoh and the kings of the Medes and Persians. It was in reference to such providential positioning that the Jewish exile Mordecai posed the haunting question to Esther when she rose to the position of queen in Medo-Persia, “Who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?”4

In the entire record of God’s dealings with humanity, however, there is no more dramatic and consequential instance of providential positioning than the positioning of Jesus of Nazareth in a particular human family and community within an obscure province of the Roman Empire at a particular time in human history.

The physician Luke begins his Gospel by describing the work of Jesus’ advance man, John the Baptist. He does so by positioning the time of their public ministry politically:

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene—during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah.5

Jesus himself, speaking in the synagogue of his hometown of Nazareth, describes his positioning as fulfilling the ancient prophecy of Isaiah:

He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”6

On several other occasions, Jesus implies that his decisions to refrain from certain activities also involved providential timing and positioning. “My hour has not yet come,” he tells his mother when she asks him to intervene miraculously at the wedding in Cana.7 “My time is not yet here,” he tells his brothers when they want him to publicly display himself at a feast.8

The apostle John, who seemed to be especially aware that the events and circumstances of Jesus’ life were providentially ordered, tells us that Jesus was acutely conscious of God’s timing and positioning just prior to his arrest, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension: “It was just before the Passover Festival. Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father … that he had come from God and was returning to God.”9

With respect to all the events and acts of Jesus’ life one might ask, Why then? Why there? Why in that way? We can speculate, but only God knows the definitive answers to these types of questions. What is clearly taught in Scripture is that there was providential purpose in Jesus’ being placed at a particular place and time in the history of the world to say and do the things he said and did, just as I believe there is providential purpose in the placement of you and me in the particular places and times in which we find ourselves. The challenge for us is to discern that purpose and to live and act in the light of it, just as Jesus did.

Incarnation

How do you make the existence and nature of a being as lofty, mysterious, and spiritual as God real and understandable to human beings? God’s answer to that question, according to the New Testament writers, is through “incarnation”—by embodying deity in flesh, by incorporating deity into a body, in particular a human man, Jesus of Nazareth.

The apostle John describes it this way: “In the beginning was the Word … the Word was God … The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us … the one and only … who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”10 Similarly, the apostle Paul: “When the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman … to redeem.”11

It is at this point that I am in danger of losing the interest and attention of some of my political friends and others of you who simply cannot bring yourselves to believe in the deity of Jesus. He was a good man, you say. He may have been a great teacher. He didn’t deserve the cruel fate that he suffered. But he was not divine, you say, and those who believe so are deceived.

Rather than part company over the deity of Jesus, let me try to persuade you to linger a little longer in his company. Because if you are a person with any interest at all in learning how to be effective in public life, particularly in communicating substantive and complex ideas and propositions to ordinary people, there is much to be learned from Jesus of Nazareth and the concept, if not the reality, of incarnation.

To incarnate means to embody in flesh, to put into a body, especially a human form. In Jesus’ case, this included not only his physical birth, which Christians consider miraculous, but also his un-miraculous upbringing in a humble family; his apprenticeship, likely beginning at age 12, in a trade; his many years (up to 18) toiling in a carpenter’s shop interacting with farmers, fishermen, merchants, and the like; until at age 30 he began to speak and teach in public as an itinerant rabbi, a public ministry that would last only three short years.

The time ratios here are important and worth noting. Up to six years in the community, the carpenter’s shop, the marketplace—interacting with the types of people who will one day constitute the bulk of his public audiences, hearing about their troubles and hopes, listening to their stories and conversation, absorbing their vocabulary and reference points—for every one year of teaching and communicating in the public arena. Six to one is the ratio of private preparation to public communication.

Incarnational Communications

When Jesus finally stepped into the public arena, he was an “incarnational communicator” and surely one of the most effective public communicators this world has ever seen—someone from whom any public communicator can learn a great deal. He embodied, became the personification of, the truths he sought to communicate. He was fully immersed in the community of human beings he had come to influence. And his choice of words, phrases, and illustrations put flesh upon, made intrinsically human and tangible, spiritual truths and realities so that his audiences could better grasp and accept—virtually see, feel, touch, and embrace—what he was talking about.

Note first of all the lofty and seemingly otherworldly ideas and truths that it was the purpose of his public ministry to communicate: ideas and truths about the nature and will of God, a spiritual kingdom, the foundations of happiness (blessedness), spiritual illumination, the laws of God, spiritual communication (prayer), retaliation and reconciliation, spiritual temptation, heaven and hell, the spiritual consequences of human actions, judgment and justice, spiritual direction, the power and meaning of faith, spiritual deprivation and nourishment, the agents and consequences of evil, the spiritual roots of pain and suffering, spiritual comfort, the reality and meaning of death, spiritual life and death, spiritual and temporal authority, the meaning of truth, spiritual work, self-sacrificial love, spiritual unity, eternal life, the person and work of the spirit of God—the list goes on and on, concepts and truths of a high level of abstraction, seemingly intangible and for the most part beyond the ability of ordinary folk to feel, grasp, and embrace.

But note how Jesus put “flesh” on these concepts and truths to make the seemingly intangible real and tangible. He did so by expressing these truths in words, phrases, and analogies drawn from where? Not primarily from the experience and vocabulary of the religious academy of his day but directly from the circumstances and vocabularies of those he communicated with and among whom he worked and conversed for 18 years. Words, phrases, and analogies that include salt of the earth, the light of a lamp, a cloak given away, rust and moths, birds of the air, lilies of the field, sawdust in the eye, narrow and broad gates, wolves and sheep, the fruit of the tree, houses built on sand or rock, the holes of foxes, the nests of birds, brides and bridegrooms, weddings and other feasts, patches on garments, new and old wineskins, sheep without shepherds, workers for the harvest fields, children in the marketplace, a sheep in a pit, an ox in a ditch, a house swept clean, yeast in the dough, fish in the net, good and bad servants, sowers of seeds, reapers of harvests, the size of a mustard seed, wheat in a field, weeds in a field, stony or thorny ground, landlords and tenants, workers in a vineyard, winepresses and millstones, the fruit of the vine, vines and branches, taxes to Caesar, clean and unclean cups, oil for lamps, fruitful and barren fig trees, sheep separated from goats, a child in the midst, and wine and bread. Often woven into stories and parables, such words and phrases were designed to both enlighten and provoke questions—stories and parables again drawn largely from his own knowledge and experience of the lives and circumstances of his hearers.12

Also note the nature of the venues where he met and encountered people: yes, sometimes in a synagogue or formal place of learning, but more often on a hill beside a lake, in a small boat pushed off from the shore, in a disciple’s house, at a party with tax collectors and prostitutes, in the marketplace, at a wedding feast, at religious feasts, in a garden, on the road, at a well, and in dozens of other places where he was accessible to sick people, poor people, inquirers, skeptics, critics, lawyers, scribes, priests, soldiers, tax collectors, women, and children.

This is incarnational communication, with three distinctive characteristics: (1) The communicator literally embodies and personifies the truths to be communicated. (2) The communicator has so immersed himself or herself in the community that he or she is an integral part of it, not distant from it. (3) The communication is expressed as much as possible within the conceptual frameworks and in the vocabulary not of the communicator but of the community to be influenced. It is today what communications consultants would call receiver-oriented communication.

Source-Oriented Versus

Receiver-Oriented Communication

There is an old and simple model, originating with electronic engineers, of how communication works that I have found most helpful in framing my own communication efforts on both political and religious subjects. It conceptualizes communication as originating with a source who wishes to generate a response from a receiver through the transmission of information (messages) via a medium. The communication occurs in a context that significantly influences it and is complicated by the existence of noise—competing information and messages.

The communication is further complicated by the fact that messages from the source and responses from the receiver both pass through the respective communication grids of each—defining aspects of their respective cultures, conceptual frameworks, thought patterns, and vocabularies that shape the formation and reception of the messages and feedback. When the source’s grid is significantly different than the receiver’s grid, we encounter all the challenges of cross-cultural communication, such as when oil companies communicate with Indigenous peoples, scientists communicate with politicians, or believers communicate with non-believers on spiritual topics.

Source-oriented communicators express their ideas in the way those ideas came to them (the source), in the words and phrases of the source’s vocabulary and conceptual framework, and in venues and through media with which the source is most familiar and comfortable. Such communicators often live and operate at considerable psychological, social, and physical distance from the rank and file of the public. They put much of the onus of understanding what is being communicated on the audience rather than assuming that burden themselves.

Scientists and academics, preachers and professors, and persons in positions of authority such as corporate executives and high-level civil servants tend to be source-oriented communicators. Moses and the scribes and Pharisees13 of Jesus’ day were for the most part source-oriented communicators—indeed this is generally the communication style of lawgivers. While this communication style certainly has its place and is highly effective in peer-to-peer communications, it is generally far less effective in communicating with the general public.

If you are a receiver-oriented communicator you will also have definite communications objectives and messages that you as the source want to convey in order to generate a desired audience response. But you do not start planning your communications from the source-oriented perspective of “what do I want to say?”; rather you start with “who are these people I am communicating with?” What are they like—their hopes, their fears, their attitudes, their backgrounds? What do they know or not know about me and my subject? What is their vocabulary? What are their venue and media preferences? What competing information and messages are they receiving? What will be the physical circumstances and psychological climate when and where I will be communicating with them? Then, having asked and answered these questions about the intended receivers of your communication—much easier to do accurately if you have lived and worked among them—you now proceed to framing your communication and messages with the needs and character of your audience (the receivers) uppermost in your mind.14

Genuine democratic discourse requires that politicians and political communicators be more receiver-oriented than source-oriented.15 And I would argue that as Christians desirous of effectively communicating to others the spiritual truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ we also need to be much more receiver-oriented—personally embodying the gospel’s central characteristic of self-sacrificial love, fully immersing ourselves among those we seek to serve, and framing our messages in the terms and words that they would use if they understood our message and were communicating it to someone else.

The psalmist (and political leader) David was a receiver-oriented communicator, as were many of the Old Testament prophets. But Jesus of Nazareth was the master of this style of communication. By embodying the truths he sought to communicate, by practising the self-sacrificial love that he preached, he gained an authority in spiritual matters that exceeded that of the scribes and Pharisees. As he spoke and taught in terms and words that the common people used and could understand, people were willing to listen to him, flocked to hear him, and were amazed at what they saw and heard.16 The Sermon on the Mount was effective because the sermonizer was not some distant moralizer but a communicator incarnate and embedded in the lives and culture of those whom he addressed in words and phrases drawn from their own experiences.17 As even the temple guards sent to arrest him acknowledged, “No one ever spoke the way this man does.”18

Implications for Us

As previously mentioned, if we believe in the providential placement of ourselves as human beings in particular places and times in order to participate in achieving God’s purposes in the world, the first challenge for us is to discern those purposes and to live and act in the light of them, just as Jesus did.

But if those purposes require us to communicate in the public sphere, the second challenge is to become incarnational communicators, with Jesus again serving as the great example.19 So if you are someone in a position to communicate spiritual or political truths and messages to individuals or public audiences,

• To what extent do you yourself embody and personify the truths and messages you seek to communicate?

• To what extent have you immersed yourself in the lives and community of those you seek to influence?

• To what extent have you framed your communication within the conceptual frameworks and vocabulary of those with whom you are communicating?

• How much time and effort have you devoted in preparation to become an effective incarnational communicator?

Imagine if we required anyone wanting to enter the public arena to spend six years of incarnational preparation—learning the troubles, hopes, habits, stories, and vocabulary of his or her constituents—for every year of intended public service.

Imagine if we required anyone wanting to enter the Christian ministry to spend six years immersing themselves not just in theological textbooks and Scripture study, important as these are, but in direct and daily interaction with the troubles, hopes, habits, stories, and vocabulary of their future parishioners for every one year of intended public ministry.