The Virgin Birth and the Empty Tomb
Celebrating Advent with Karl Barth
The Virgin birth denotes particularly the mystery of revelation. It denotes the fact that God stands at the start where real revelation takes place—God and not the arbitrary cleverness, capability, or piety of man. In Jesus Christ God comes forth out of the profound hiddenness of His divinity in order to act as God among us and upon us. That is revealed and made visible to us in the sign of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, but it is grounded upon the fact signified by the Virgin birth, that here in this Jesus God Himself has really come down and concealed Himself in humanity. It is because He was veiled here that He could and had to unveil Himself as He did at Easter. The empty tomb, on the other hand, denotes particularly the revelation of the mystery. It denotes that it is not for nothing that God stands at the beginning, but that it is as such that He becomes active and knowable. He has no need of human power and is free from all human caprice. Therefore even the ultimate extremities of human existence, as He submits to them and abandons Himself to death, offer no hindrance to His being and work. That God Himself in His complete majesty was one with us, as the Virgin birth indicates, is verified in what the empty tomb indicates, that here in this Jesus the living God has spoken to us men in accents we cannot fail to hear. Because He has unveiled Himself here as the One He is, we may and must say what the Christmas message says, that unto you is born this day the Saviour. The mystery at the beginning is the basis of the mystery at the end; and by the mystery of the end the mystery of the beginning becomes active and knowable. And since this is so, the same objective content is signified in the one case by the miracle of the Virgin birth, in the other by the miracle of the empty tomb.
— Karl Barth1
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, ed. Geoffrey William Bromiley, Thomas F. Torrance, and Frank McCombie (T&T Clark, 2004).
Yes, as our painting here reminds us, God’s angels appear at both signs of the mystery of God’s own objective revelation in Jesus Christ our Lord, addressing, as in the picture, named women in particular. Beg your pardon, do I, but, as with last week, our footnote again is mistaken, and this text of CD is from I/2, “The Doctrine of Word of God,” “The Incarnation of the Word,” not from II/1. God bless ye merry ladies and gentlemen!