Rowan Williams sees creation through the human, divine Christ

We may be accustomed to thinking of God becoming human as a miracle, an improbable outlier event of history whose very definition involves the sharpest possible contradiction between the terms it unites. But any serious belief that it has taken place involves a rethinking of those terms themselves.

Most fundamentally, incarnation re­quires a transformed understanding of cre­ation. The possibility, the actuality, of divine and human becoming one had to have been “baked in” from the beginning. The New Testament therefore sees Christ as a profound commentary on Gene­sis, a radical redefinition of what it means for humans to bear the image of God.

The Gospel of John insists that in the beginning nothing was made apart from the Word that would eventually become flesh. The world and humanity are from the start pregnant with God. Mary’s meeting with Gabriel, rather than a supernatural event of shock and awe, could seem that way only because we have grown so far out of touch with our own origins and nature.