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The Beginning and
End of The Incarnation
By John Gavazzoni



Among the visions and messages given to John on the Isle of Patmos by the glorified Jesus was His self-identification as The Beginning and the End. "The End," as the KJV has it, has the sense in the Greek of "The Goal." Within the dimension of the ages, of things created, things have a beginning and an end, a birth and a death, a time to live and a time to die, with the goal in view of death being swallowed up in victory, i.e., the defeat of death through victorious resurrection.

The incarnating of Spirit, of Spirit becoming flesh, with the full bodily humanizing of Deity at its center involves an eonian process from the beginning of the ages to their end. The process has a commencement and a finalization (goal). The Son of God, as Jesus, the Son of Man, IS that Commencement and Goal, but not only as Jesus, the individual, but the same Jesus, glorified, in Spirit becoming universally incarnate as the life of the whole body of humanity, often referred to as the many-membered Christ, though I might suggest more accurately, the many-persons-membered Christ.

In other words, Jesus, the firstborn of many brethren, the firstborn from among the dead; the firstborn of all creation, distributed Himself as the life-giving Spirit, to, into, and to become the True/Real/Genuine universal corporate Man. There is Jesus as the individual Uniquely-begotten Son of God, the Seed of the New Humanity, and Jesus as the full-flowering of that Seed in and as the many.

Since the ultimate goal of incarnation is the bodily glorification of the whole of humanity, its beginning must be traced to the first human. The process of incarnation began before the conception and birth of Jesus of Nazareth as is conventionally believed. It began as Adam, the son of God as he is described in the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. Jesus and Adam are two distinct individuals, to be sure, but having the same origin of divine sonship.

The son of God as the first man was man conscious only of his creaturehood, while the Seed of his sonship remained hidden even to himself until the birth of The Second Man/The Last Adam, in, and by whom the Godness-nature/essence of humanity was unveiled, and men beheld His glory, the glory of the Only/Uniquely-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. A virgin birth was necessary for that consciously-realized union of Godness and Humanness in a Man, the historical Jesus of Nazareth. There is only one divine sonship of which we all partake within the One in whom we are all complete. THE Son emptied Himself into creaturehood, accepting in Himself the same futility to which the whole creation has been subjected with the full glorification of all humanity in view.

It is understandable that the reader might protest that what I've laid out here makes the Son of God to be a sinner. No, as God's Son, He is incorruptible, but in regard to His absolute solidarity with creatureliness, His experience, of necessity, had to include corruptibility so that in Him, corruption would be swallowed up in incorruptibility. Sonship de-corrupts creaturehood, but creaturehood cannot corrupt Sonship. That which is born of God continuously cannot sin, for His Seed remains in Him. That Seed is the Divine Nature. There is an open door from sonship's side to save and transform creaturehood, but from the creature's side, the door is barred from corrupting Sonship.

St. Paul's daring declaration that He was made sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him, traces all the way back to Adam's sin. Spirit is incorruptible. Flesh is corruptible. The flesh that the Word became was none other than the flesh of all humanity, or we might better say, that the flesh of the Son of Man is the (true) flesh of all humanity. Scriptural references, for instance, to Jesus being tempted in all things like as we are, and that He bore our sins IN HIS OWN BODY on the tree (emphasis, mine) call for our deep reflection on this subject. He bore our sins in His own body. How was His body related to Adam's body? Are they two unrelated human embodiments?

Theologically, we dare not posit that Adam's humanity and Jesus' humanity were/are generically contradistinctive. To be our Kinsman Redeemer, Jesus' humanity had to be of the very kind as Adam's.... a fully-embodied humanness in which the body is integral to what the person is. Jesus and Adam were, and continue to be, as it were, joined at the hip. Jesus got His embodied Humanity from Adam via Mary, and He was conceived in her by the Holy Spirit so that He could be simultaneously, existentially, and historically, the Son of God and the Son of Man. Jonathan Mitchell, in his translation of the New Testament brings out that the title of Jesus as the Son of Man equates to Son of Adam.

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