An Antiseptic Incarnation?

freeing ourselves from empire's view of holiness

It’s the season where my thoughts turn toward birth—my own, Mary’s, and the countless births that have unfolded in countless ways. The messy ones, the bloody ones, the quiet ones, the chaotic ones. Each a mirror of the sacred. Each a testament to the holiness stitched into every moment—beautiful or brutal, ordinary or astonishing. This, I think, is the heart of divinity taking on flesh.

I’ve often said that the Bible is a book written by men, for men. Throughout history, most of its interpreters have been men too. It’s no surprise, then, that the story of the incarnation is often sterilized, gliding over the messy, sacred realities of birth. We’re told of the politics that sent Joseph to Bethlehem, of shepherds keeping watch, and angels singing in the skies. But we hear nothing of the blood, the primal groans of a person laboring, the strength and fear interwoven in a body as it bears the weight of divinity into the world.

Perhaps this is where empire handed us our first antiseptic views of holiness—where we began to sanitize the sacred. Empire thrives on control, on a vision of holiness that is detached from the body, from the earth, from the rawness of what it means to be human. It fears what it cannot tame: the birthing woman, naked and stretched; the Christ child, dependent and vulnerable. And so, the story of incarnation was rendered antiseptic, turned into a quiet nativity scene that refuses to bear witness to the terror and beauty of God entering the world through the flesh of a marginalized woman.

We talk so often about Jesus’s body being broken for us, but we rarely talk about Mary’s body—broken, bent, and bleeding for him.

Her labor is the first act of surrender in the incarnation. Her body made a space for God to take form, her muscles tore to bring him into being, her cries announced the arrival of Emmanuel. Empire would prefer we forget this, for it is in Mary’s body that we find a theology of resistance.

A broken, refugee, brown, female, naked, hormonal, stretched, marginalized body is how divinity entered the world. It is not through thrones or armies or imperial decrees that salvation comes, but through the sacred labor of the oppressed. This is the scandal of incarnation. God does not arrive in clean, controlled spaces but in the rawness of flesh and blood, in the sweat and breath of a vulnerable woman.

While Western theology sanitizes these moments, these are the very things that make up our faith: the mess and ache of being alive in a body.

Mary’s story ended with a child in her arms, yes. But not all stories unfold that way. The nativity scenes we know fail to show us the fullness of what it means to live in faith. Faith is not just the joy of arrival but also the longing, the despair, the questions that linger unanswered. It is the sadness, the anger, the aching spaces in between.

And this is where empire trembles—because empire seeks to divide the sacred from the real, the spiritual from the bodily, to make holiness a thing of temples and palaces, far removed from the groaning of the earth. But in the birth of Christ, we find a God who enters the chaos, who dwells in the messiness of humanity.

Mary reminds us that God is found in the bodies empire seeks to break, in the places it tries to erase. The sacred is not untouched by sorrow or pain; it is born in the midst of it.

This story is a testament to what we so often try to forget: holiness is not distant from the carnal. It is not clean and untouchable. Holiness is wrapped in blood and breath and the cry of a newborn in the night. It is as deeply human as it is divine. And perhaps, that is the miracle.