This year, in this slightly strange holiday season, as we work on our scheduling (in the midst of potential service cuts and disruptions brought about by more than the usual degree of uncertainty in both our industry and our nation), may the grace of God yet bring us to blessed remembrance of what the words “Advent” and “Christmas” truly, truly mean.
Apprehending Advent
Even during this yuletide season, I’m not sure that we who call ourselves followers of Christ often give much thought to the supreme miracle that we are about to celebrate, the miracle that exists at the very center of our faith. The advent on earth of the universal God in human form is a mystery both unfathomable and blessed. We are all far the less if we do not take time at this season, or at any time of the year for that matter, to ponder the sublime reality of God becoming a man.
No other religion in the world puts forth the idea of a Supreme Being so willing to identify with His deeply fallen human creation as to literally become one of them. That He would do so out of love, because only such an “incarnation” would make possible our rescue from spiritual death, can become for us an incredibly sweet and compelling truth if we but ponder it for a while. It is mind-boggling, yes, but even though we cannot completely comprehend the full glory of our Lord becoming incarnate, we can apprehend it in such a way as to open a door to one of the greatest and most transcendent blessings that we can know in our Christian walk.
Just think about it. We belong to a God who so loved us as to become one of us to make that “belonging” possible. What indescribable condescension must that have entailed for One who is infinite, eternal and uncaused Being? I once wrote that it is somewhat akin to a man becoming a flea to save a world of fleas, but that barely begins to cover the magnitude of the descent we now consider. It is truly the miracle of all ages.
A Heart Affair
But do not just use your intellect in your endeavor to experience the truth of the earthly advent of the Lord Jesus Christ, use your heart as well for this is also nothing if not an affair of the heart.
How can our hearts not love Immanuel, “God with us”? Christmas testifies to the beginning of a new and profound opportunity for human intimacy with God, an intimacy with God as man. How can we remain unmoved by a Holy God, One “Wholly Other” as one German theologian once described his innate separation from us, becoming us? The mere fact of the Son of God becoming also the Son of Man is enough, in my opinion, to make Christianity the most compelling belief system on the planet. No one has a God like ours, no one, and it is Jesus, the God-Man, who makes this so.
Is Anything More Compelling?
Perhaps the only thing more compelling than the Advent itself is the reality that the God who arrived on earth as one fully human over two-thousand years ago then proceeded to go to the cross and defeat death for what were now His fellow human beings as well as His creation. Contemplate that. He made us but, because of Christmas, He also died for us, as one of us.
But then that is a story for another Holy Day, a few months from now.
