This Advent and Christmas celebrate the strangeness of the God who draws alongside us as one of us.

My wife Pip and I love doing puzzles. It's a challenge, it's companionable but most importantly we work alongside each other. We're both working on the same thing and there's no competition! We have the same goal, and we can both be winners when that last piece goes in.

There's something about being alongside one another that's very satisfying. It's not a one-on-one competition – face to face – nose to nose – the winner takes it all. It's alongside – a posture of humility, cooperation and friendship.

The wars that are taking place today are an extreme example of competition. Think of the trenches in the Russia-Ukraine war – think of the battle lines in Gaza. This is not alongside but face to face confrontation.

Jesus came into a world of confrontation and extreme coercion. Judea, where he was born, was occupied by the Romans – the mightiest military power in ancient times. With the Romans there were only two options – cooperation or death. And the bodies of the crucified on the main roads into Jerusalem were a constant reminder of who was in charge and the cost of resistance.

But into this world of suffering and coercion, God sent his Son. At Advent and Christmas, we turn our thoughts to this momentous event - when God became a human being and dwelt among us. I suppose God could have come to us in any number of ways or communicated using any channel he chose. But it's fundamentally instructive and illuminating that God chose to come alongside us as a human being.

Now some find this whole idea of the incarnation a preposterous thing. Theologians have called it 'the scandal of particularity' because at first glance it seems ludicrous that the eternal God should enter human history in this very localised way – alongside us. Why should this one man, Jesus Christ, have universal significance? And doesn't focussing on a particular religion, lead to arrogance and bigotry - the one thing that the world can do without? And didn't Jesus himself epitomise the scandal when he said, "No one comes to the Father but through me?" - John 14:6.

To answer this, I invite you to take another look at Jesus. The scandal of particularity says that God loved humankind so much, that he became a human being, speaking a language understood by people. Jesus was a Jew, spoke the language of the Jews and used the thought forms of the Jews to communicate with people. God's love found local and particular expression first and then it spread out to the world. In Jesus, God drew alongside us – without coercion but with empathy, understanding and great humility.

Furthermore, God committed himself fully and permanently to our humanity through his Son Jesus Christ. The eternal entered time and the infinite entered space – alongside us. God bound himself to our humanity never again to lay it aside. He embraced our humanity with such intensity, that all of humanity is represented in this one person. And so in this way the single man Jesus, is indeed qualified to be the saviour of all.

Celebrated historian Tom Holland in his book 'Dominion' said,

"To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it—the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe—that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity."

Christianity is strange because of the posture of God. God drew alongside us in Jesus and draws alongside us still by his Holy Spirit. Let us celebrate and glory in our 'alongside God' this Advent and Christmas. Amen.

The Ven. Canon Mark Chamberlain