It is a strange story. There were shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel appeared to them, telling them not to be afraid. A baby had been born, and they could find him wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger. To a peasant mother outside of Bethlehem, the Son of God was born.
If we examine the story in October, taking a step back from the familiar hum of Christmas to consider the story Christians are really waiting for, we may well be thrown off our usual Christmas kilter. This is not really the innocuous historical narrative we propagate. It’s not really a tame story. The bright lights and colors of our Christmas pageants can easily paint over the stark scenery of a story that startles all of history. Who really understands a God who comes as a child, who steps into our world through a dirty stable and the unlikely arms of an unwed mother?
Yet even long before these strange additions to the story of God among his people, the prophets were asking similar questions: “Who has understood the mind of the LORD?”(1) This God who moves unhindered among ordinary people, touching life and history, is not the tame and therapeutic being we attempt to package. Maybe God’s ways are not our ways. God’s stories are certainly not the kind of stories we would write if the telling were up to us. Maybe God’s thoughts, unlike our own, are the kind of thoughts that cannot be contained. They expose deception and shine in darkness; they shatter hearts and rewrite stories.
It is the same with the child born in a stable two thousand years ago. The infant the world remembers lying peacefully in a manger with cattle lowing nearby did not take long to fulfill the words spoken to his young parents: “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.”(2) This is definitely not the sort of thing a stranger typically says to a young mother holding a baby. Is this the child we anticipate as fall turns to holiday fervor?
British author Dorothy Sayers once lamented the manner in which Jesus is often remembered: he is the quiet sage full of wisdom, the safe and peaceful one of history. He is, for all practical purposes, somewhat dull, someone we might easily be interested in at a later time. Yet Sayers writes:
“The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore—on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him ‘meek and mild,’ and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.”(3)
The Christian remembrance of the Incarnation is a time of anticipation not for the harmless baby surrounded by lights and presents, but for the dynamic savior who is born into our midst in a way that must forever change us. “Do you want to be delivered?” asked Dietrich Bonhoeffer in an Advent sermon more than seventy years ago. “That is the only really important and decisive question which Advent poses for us. Does there burn within us some lingering longing to know what deliverance really means? If not, what would Advent then mean to us? A bit of sentimentality. A little lifting of the spirit within us? A little kinder mood? But if there is something in this word Advent which we have not yet known, that strangely warms our heart; if we suspect that it could, once more, once more, mean a turning point in our life, a turning to God, to Christ—why then are we not simply obedient, listening and hearing in our ears the clear call: Your deliverance draws nigh!”(2)
In the coming of fall and the approach of Advent, we hear a strange and drastic story. The church anticipates nothing less than the Lion of Judah wrapped in swaddling cloths; the coming of a human rescuer unhindered. Mercifully, mystery itself, draws nigh.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) Isaiah 40:13.
(2) Luke 2:34-35.
(3) Dorothy Sayers, The Whimsical Christian, “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged,” (New York: Collier Books, 1978), 14.
(4) Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons, Edwin Robertson Ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 93.
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