“Isn’t it absurd?” I have tried to answer this question in two ways, dealing with what the story of the birth of Christ tells and how it may have happened. I have tried to say that although there are elements to it that we certainly fail to understand, still there's nothing absurd about it. As a matter of fact, it's the most reasonable thing in the universe.
What if we just lived on and on? What if we found eternal life and lived forever in exactly the form in which we find ourselves now, growing increasingly hard, increasingly bitter, increasingly arrogant, and increasingly selfish? That would be no salvation at all. That would be a living hell. We need a God who is not only able to save us physically, but spiritually, and to make from the slime of our spiritual lives—which we ourselves have made—the purity of spiritual jewels who by his grace are fit to stand before him.
The great medieval theologian, Anselm of Canterbury, wrestled with this idea of the necessity of God becoming man. In fact, it is the title of his well-known book, Cur Deus Homo (Latin for “Why the God-Man?”). Suppose the question had been raised to Anselm, "Isn't it absurd that the God of the universe should become man?" In his book, he in a sense answers that question.
How do you answer the idea that the story of Christ is absurd? I want to say that how you answer it depends entirely upon how you ask the question. One way of asking the question is to say, "Isn't what he did absurd? Isn't the story itself absurd? Isn't what it communicates absurd?" If we ask the question that way, the answer is easy. It is not absurd at all. In fact, the story of Jesus is necessary for our salvation.
When the angel appeared to her to say that she would conceive and give birth to a son and that her conception would be apart from a male agent, that the baby would have no human father, she asked, "How can this be, since I am a virgin." I say, that was a believing question. She was not doubting what the angel said, but she was perplexed over how something like that could come about.
