1 Peter 1:8–12
8 Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, 9 obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
10 Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, 11 inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. 12 It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look.
(ESV)
An Ultrasound of Redemption
Labor and childbirth are among the New Testament’s favorite metaphors for depicting God’s coming Kingdom. Romans 8 describes all of creation groaning as with labor pains. In John’s Gospel, when Jesus predicts his own betrayal and death, he warns his disciples of the coming sorrow while also promising that that same sorrow will soon turn to joy, and he too invokes childbirth to drive this point home: “When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world” (John 16:21). These metaphors tap into what is about as close as we can get to universal human experience, since, without exception, labor and childbirth are how we all got here. So, it is no wonder that the Bible finds these physical realities particularly useful for disclosing truths about our shared spiritual reality.
These metaphors are especially poignant for me presently since my family is expecting a new member to join us in January. Any parent will know how this experience immediately resolves whatever tension might be implied by verse 8 (“Though you have not seen him, you love him”). As for our new daughter, I have not seen her (other than a grainy ultrasound image), but I love her. We rejoiced when we received the news of the pregnancy, but that joy was also mixed with a natural measure of fear and uncertainty. Even the smoothest pregnancy is a heavy physical and emotional load for the mother to carry. We also know that nothing is promised in this life, so we feel a natural anxiety concerning the factors we can’t control. The way Peter describes the gospel here, the Old Testament prophets showed us something like that grainy ultrasound photo of my yet-unborn daughter. The photo is of her, but it’s not her. So, if we rejoiced at the photo, how much greater will the joy be when she is with us in the flesh, when the pain of childbirth has passed, and much (but not nearly all) of the uncertainty is behind us?
In the Christmas story, labor and childbirth are not mere metaphors. God’s word makes frequent use of metaphors to express the truth of the gospel, but Jesus is the Word become flesh, and the fleshly realities of conception, gestation, labor, and childbirth are the very real and embodied means by which this miracle we call the incarnation came to pass. Jesus is the ultimate reality, imperfectly outlined in all our stories, metaphors, hopes, and fears, and this ultimate reality isn’t abstract or otherworldly; it is flesh and bones. This is why verse 12 tells us that these are things even angels, who are with God in heaven, long to see: because the redemption for which creation is groaning isn’t about spirits being freed from the prison of the body, and it isn’t about a heaven where we get to leave earth behind. The promise of the incarnation is a God dwelling in and with and among his creation, a new, redeemed creation in which all that is broken is made right. And that promise is sealed in the resurrection, in which Christ was raised bodily as the firstborn of all the redeemed.
Jack O'Briant