Christmas I

Christmas-tide always immerses us in the contemplation of the Incarnation. It’s almost a crash course in reminding us what the Incarnation means, since we often forget it during the rest of the year, despite its lying at the root of everything else we celebrate during the course of the year.

There are plenty enough things in life to boggle one’s mind without taking on the mystery of the Incarnation. There’s also that struggle within the soul the desire to know everything or not to have all the answers.

I’ve used this example of that tension before: sometimes when I pick up one of my cats to listen to their purr, I wonder: ‘I really wish I understood how you guys do that.’ I also know that not even the vets and scientists haven’t quite figured out why cats purr and dogs don’t — they’ve gotten as far as determining that the purr has something to do with the blood circulating through their system but beyond that, they haven’t gotten too far. My next, almost immediate, thought is: ‘Yes, but if I know what makes you purr, then I will no longer consider it a mystery and some of my delight in hearing it will be diminished.’

So it is for the mystery and wonder of the Incarnation. We want to understand it, but at the same time, to parse it all out would then diminish the wonder it inspires in us. If we fully understood the Incarnation, for example, the artistic impulse to depict it might not have flourished for centuries and centuries. We might lose the genius of people like Hafiz, the Persian poet, who wrote: ‘God looked where in the world he might display his face. He pitched his tent in human fields, no other place.’

The book I chose to read to the children at the early service Christmas Eve consists of drawings of Jesus as a baby (appropriately titled, Baby Jesus). Granted, many of them are the early 1900s quasi-Victorian renditions of a blond, blue-eyed baby, but to cut the artists some slack, they were painting what they knew best — themselves. In another wonderful book on Jesus, The Faces of Jesus, written by Fred Buechner, page after page shows artistic renditions from all over the globe. It’s quite wondrous to see a Chinese or mahogany dark Jesus rather than the blue-eyed version (no offence). When all is said and done, there is no real way to capture Jesus — his being is a mystery.

The artists of the centuries know how to capture mystery. And so do we if we open our hearts to it. We have daily encounters with the Grace and Truth that has come into this world.

Even so, it seems hard to believe — the tragic events of this week in Pakistan with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the subsequent chaos with its scores of deaths underscore the struggle we have sometimes in recognising and believing that God has become incarnate amongst us to love us. We can believe in that desire when we look at a baby, but how do we find it in those who seek to do us harm? How do we believe in the Incarnation when faced with all the human frailty and brokenness that surround us — not just on a global level but as we look at one another sitting in these pews this morning and within ourselves? Where is God? Where is love?

Karl Rahner wrote: ‘God, you took up the very thing you wanted to discard. You began what we thought would end with your coming: our poor human kind of life, which is sheer frailty, finiteness, and death. Contrary to all our fond hopes, you seized upon precisely this kind of human life and made it your own. And you did this not in order to change or abolish it, not so that you could visibly and tangibly transform it, not to divinize it. No, you took upon yourself this kind of life, just as it is. You let it slip away from you, just as ours vanishes from us.’ (1)

That is the mystery — that the Word became flesh and lived among us, in all our limitations. In Jesus God took on our humanity, became a vessel of flesh so that we might understand and, in understanding, might be able to know and receive the love of God, which is this Word and Light made flesh in our silence and darkness.
God enfleshed, God present with us….

The Word, the Light from God becomes flesh and lives among us, full of grace and truth, reminding us that we, too, are meant for grace and truth, and that on a more simple level, we are not alone. God is with us.

God in Jesus discovers our humanity, so that we may in believable ways discover our divinity, our holiness and worth — it works both ways. God’s holy word among us helps us to accept our first birthing as well as our dying to new birth. Throughout our lives, we dance with this God of love, who became one of us in Christ. Sometimes we get it; sometimes we even see God’s love, sometimes we even see God in another person. It is in moments like these, that we understand that the Incarnation is God living a life, as one of us. We get that the human being is God fully alive. That living is love. And that love is eternal.

Fourth-century Prudentius, in his words that we sing in hymn 82, expresses this eternal love: Of the Father’s love begotten, ere the worlds began to be, he is Alpha and Omega, he the source, the ending he, of the things that are, that have been, and that future years shall see, evermore and evermore!

To which I respond with deep awe and gratitude: Yes. Yes, O God, yes.

END NOTE

(1) Karl Rahner, ‘The Divine Dawning,’ cited in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas (Farmington, PA: Plough Publishing House, 2001). Found on Diocese of Washington’s web site Advent calendar, 14 December, 2004, or: www.edow.org/spirituality/readings_archive.html#1216.