Christmas and a learning disability home

I work with adults with severe learning disabilities, to the point where none of them can talk and only one of them can even speak vaguely (and even then doesn't really understand what she's saying). As you'll no doubt expect, this has been a very interesting experience. It's been quite thought provoking being around people who are a lot less powerful than me, who have relatively little that they can contribute to the world economically, and whose minds frankly just don't work properly. Several of them have been abandoned by their parents, and spent many of their years in a disabled home, meaning that they've also been significantly deprived relationally. They're as much people as you or I - but they don't seem to understand some things that to me seem very basic facts.

In fact, this experience led me to think about a number of things about what it means to be human, and what grace means, as I am around some of the most obvious examples of the brokenness of humanity. Although I don't think all of the residents are particularly unhappy (though a couple are), I would really hate to be like them. I would find it an enormous affront to my dignity to be fed by other people, to be showered by other people, and simply to be unable to think and learn in the way I can now. And that has a rather obvious application to Christmas.

In the incarnation, Jesus took on almost all of the weaknesses that my residents have, as he became a baby. Babies are something we have a category of how to relate to in our head, so we don't necessarily realise quite what that would have been like to experience. It would have been no less a weakness and an indignity than becoming one of my residents. Jesus chose not to use his attributes of omnipotence and onniscience - and instead chose to live out life with the limits not just of humanity, but of a human baby.

Not only did he live with the limits of a human baby, but of a broken human baby. The residents at my work are broken by the consequences of the fall and of sin in a rather obvious way - their learning disability. But while from our perspective that seems a particularly broken humanity, all human beings are very deeply broken. The effects of sin have gone deep into our minds and our souls. The fact that this has happened to all of us may immunise us from realising its severity, but it does not mean that it is not severe from God's point of view. Jesus did not sin, so he did not become a sinner, but he did become a human being that had been broken by sin - just by other people's sins, rather than His own. While for us, this might not seem like a huge thing, Jesus knew what humanity was really supposed to look like, and therefore saw our humanity was broken.

Jesus did more than this, though. He not only became a weak and limited baby, broken by human sin. He also did so from a position of unparalled greatness. Even if he had chosen to become greater than the greatest human being ever - think Superman-turned-immortal-world-emperor (without the Kryptonite weakness) - that would still be an enormous step downwards, something like me becoming a slug or a spider. Think what becoming a broken and weak human baby would be like.

People (includng myself) sometimes look upon a baby in a manger as something tame and cute. In fact, it is something at once quite disgusting, and quite amazing.

It shows how truly humble Jesus is to suffer such an indignity - as well as how passionate he was about the love of the glory of the Father who He did this for. It also shows us how greatly he loved human beings, that he would do this that they could become a church that lived in a peaceful and glorious loving relationship with Him.

And above all, it points towards the cross, where all of this is seen even more profoundly. Jesus' identification with our broken humanity reaches its greatest point and greatest awfulness and awesomeness, displaying the brokenness of humanity and the greatness of God all at once.