October 15th
Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
Isaiah 53:1-2 (NIV)
What is unrecognizableness? It means not to appear in one’s proper role, as, for example, when a policeman appears in plain clothes. The absolute unrecognizableness is this: being God, to be also an individual man. To be the individual man, or an individual man (whether it be a distinguished or a lowly man is here irrelevant), is the greatest possible, the infinitely qualitative, remove from being God, and therefore the profoundest incognito.
Most people now living in Christendom live, we may be sure, in the vain persuasion that, had they lived contemporary with Christ, they would at once have known and recognized Him in spite of His unrecognizableness. [The truth is that] He was very God, and therefore to such a degree God that He was unrecognizable, so that it was not flesh and blood, but the exact opposite of flesh and blood, which prompted Peter to recognize Him.
Let us take simple human situations. When I wish to be incognito, should I regard it as a compliment if one were to come up to me and say, ‘I recognized you at once’? Most people have no notion at all of the superiority by which a man transcends himself; and the superiority which willingly assumes an incognito of such a sort that one seems to be something much lowlier than one is they have no inkling of. Or if they have an inkling of it, they will surely think, ‘What madness! What if the incognito were to be so successful that the man actually is taken for what he gives himself out to be?‘
And now in the case of the God-Man. He is God, but chooses to become the individual man. His incognito is so almightily maintained that in a way He is subjected to it, and the reality of His suffering consists in the fact that it is not merely apparent, but that in a sense the assumed incognito has power over Him. Only thus is there in the deepest sense real seriousness in the assertion that He became ‘very man’, and hence also He experiences the extremest suffering of feeling Himself forsaken of God, so that at no moment was He beyond suffering, but actually in it, and He encountered the purely human experience that reality is even more terrible than possibility, that He who had freely assumed unrecognizableness yet really suffers as though He were entrapped in unrecognizableness or had entrapped Himself.
It is the imperfection of a man’s disguise that he has the arbitrary faculty of annulling it at any instant. A disguise is the more completely serious the more one knows how to restrain this faculty and to make it less and less possible. But the unrecognizableness of the God-Man is an incognito almightily maintained, and the divine seriousness consists precisely in the fact that it is so almightily maintained that He Himself suffers under His unrecognizableness in a purely human way.
from Kierkegaard’s Training in Christianity (Pt. II, C, sect. 2)
Already used part of Isaiah 53, but anyway. One of the things I’ve always found great is that none of the disciples recognize Jesus by his appearance after the resurrection. Seriously, think about that for a minute. John (oh, sorry, the “other disciple”), if you remember, saw the empty tomb and believed without seeing. (Peter, presumably, was too traumatized by the whole gruesome death, betrayal and rooster thing to get it immediately). Mary only recognized him when he spoke. The disciples on the road to Emmaus literally spent an afternoon travelling and then had dinner with him, and then they suddenly got it.
Here’s this year’s calendar, if anyone’s interested.
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