Joan Osborne’s song “One of Us” has almost become cliche, but I remember when it first came out… I remember the outrage of so many pastors, calling it blasphemy and saying, ‘God is not just a slob on a bus!’  I didn’t really get what everyone was so offended about.  Were they offended that Joan Osborne called God a slob?  Someone unkempt?  Is that what was so offensive about the song?  But how can the incarnation be anything but offensive?  Even the Apostle Paul calls the incarnation “a stumbling block” to those who look for power and “foolishness” to those who look for wisdom.  The only people that the incarnation is not going to offend are those who look for God to be born a bastard in extreme poverty and then die as a criminal cursed on a tree.  Do we have any takers for that God?  The incarnation is not offensive only as long as his feet never touch the ground.

My parents recently had some of their old home movies turned from super eight film into DVDs.  The footage was sixty years old or more, the colors were vibrant like only the super eight can capture and the scenes were of sunny days at the beach, a young woman in a flower print dress laying out a blanket on green grass, her daughter sitting in a bright red child sized rocking chair.  There was a dreamlike quality to the movement of the old film of my mom with her mom.  They were beautiful and overflowing with life.

But in the other room there was a very different scene.  The young woman who was laying out the blanket on the grass in the home movie was lying very still in a hospice bed.  The color was gone from her face.  Her skin seemed almost transparent, lying loosely over her hands.  By all accounts this was a good death.  She was surrounded by her family who loves her.  She had lived 96 amazing years and claimed zero regrets.  And yet, even under these best of circumstances there seemed something so offensive about her death.  The inability to walk, the moving in and out of coherent consciousness, the spoon feeding, the diapers… all the roles that she had once performed for her own child were now being reversed.

When God’s word, “became flesh and dwelt among us” he entered all of it, the very deepest of human offence.  It seems to me that Joan Osborne was saying something right… maybe orthodox, and even pulling some punches when it comes to the offensiveness of the incarnation.