The sheer strangeness of the Christmas narrative from the Gospel of Luke is easily missed when read with either an over-familiarity or a commercialized sentimentality. But the Lukan account of God’s advent into the world is fairly extraordinary. I am struck by the way Luke juxtaposes the announcement of the King of Israel—”For to you is born this day in the city of David the Savior who is Christ the Lord”—with the sign of his advent; “And this will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger” (Luke 2:11-12). The God of the universe would be born in a lowly, dirty manger, a feed trough for animals, and clothed in woven, cloth strips.

Luke’s narrative highlights what seem to be the most ordinary and the most mundane details of Jesus’s birth for many modern readers. And yet, these seemingly ordinary details highlight how God’s glory is on full display in the birth of Jesus. The gospel writer’s preoccupation with ordinary details revealed the belief that coming of the Messiah and his kingdom would look very different from the kingdom that was expected.

The Bible indicates a long silence of God speaking directly to the people—a silence of four hundred years. But out of the silence of that quiet night, the angel spoke and announced what the people of Israel had all hoped for: He is here, the gospel proclaims, born in the same city as your great king of old, King David! The people now would look upon the new David, their new deliverer, their Messiah. The prophet Micah announced this special context as well: “As for you, Bethlehem too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you one will go forth for me to be ruler in Israel. His going forth is from long ago, from the days of eternity” (5:2). Out of the silent sky came the news that surpassed all news. The Messiah had come and the world would never be the same again, for a king had been born this day in the city of David—Christ the Lord!

And yet, this king would not be born in an expected palace or even into the household of a priest, like John the Baptist, for example. God had other plans. The glorious place of Israel’s new king would be different than expected: “And this will be a sign for you; you will find a baby wrapped in cloths, and lying in a manger.” Born this day, in the city of David is your Christ, your Messiah. ‘And guess what? You’ll find him in a manger, which is the feeding trough for dirty, smelly, ordinary farm animals. Who would believe this report? How could the Messiah come with such vulnerability and poverty?

But the manger would prove to be a palace, and the first subjects of the kingdom would not be the influential or the powerful, not the righteous or the rulers. In fact, only a few people actually hear the news. After the silence of ages, God does not come with a shout, but like a whisper into the ears of a few select individuals. God comes as a crying baby needing the comfort and succor of human parents.

Mary, the young girl and as yet unmarried would be the first recipient of this good news. She was young and insignificant, and this announcement of an illegitimate and unexplained pregnancy wouldn’t help her place in that society. The announcement also comes to shepherds—the least influential folks in that society—young boys, out in the fields, far from their towns and villages, tending to the sheep. The glory of Israel is revealed to those most would deem inglorious. Israel’s new king is born to a young, unmarried girl, in a town not her home, in a dirty, small manger with animals as the initial witnesses to the birth. The heavenly announcement is made only to a group of poor, unnoticed shepherds.

Unveiling the glory of God through humble means and ordinary details is a point Luke’s gospel highlights in portraying a kingdom of upside down expectations. The Almighty God, who created heaven and earth, who created the shepherds and the animals, Mary and Joseph, was the same God who chose to be glorified in human flesh as the baby Jesus. Humility reveals the glory of God! Humility demonstrates God’s greatness and glory, and humility is one of the hallmarks of Jesus’s Kingdom. Dr. James Denison elaborates: “As a young child, [Jesus] was celebrated by foreign Magi, not of his own people. He spent his public ministry touching lepers, welcoming Gentiles and prostitutes, discipling tax collectors and other despised people, and offering the gospel to all who would receive it. His birth proved the words: ‘God so loved the world that God gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but receive eternal life.’”(1)

In a world that confuses glory with glitter, glamour, power, and prestige, would we see God’s glory in this seemingly inglorious package—cradled in a feed-trough, presented to peasants, announced to shepherds? Luke’s gospel account offers a poignant picture of an unsentimental Christmas story and one that shocks those who have become numbed by familiarity. And for all who would wonder at this kind of birth, this kind of king, and this kind of God, they are welcomed to draw closer to the manger and the stable.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) James Denison, blog post 2007.

On October 30, 1938 a national radio program playing dance music was interrupted with a special news bulletin. The announcer heralded news of a massive meteor, which had crashed near Princeton, New Jersey. The reporter urged evacuation of the city as he anxiously described the unfolding scene: Strange creatures were emerging from the meteor armed with deadly rays and poisonous gases.

The infamous broadcast, which caused panic throughout the country and mayhem all over New York and New Jersey, was made by Orson Welles, a 23-year old actor giving a dramatic presentation of the H.G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds. His compelling performance created traffic jams and tied up phone lines, interrupted religious services and altered bus routes. Several times in the program a statement was made regarding the broadcast’s fictional nature. Still, many Americans were convinced that Martians had landed. One man insisted he had heard the President Roosevelt’s voice over the radio advising all citizens to leave their cities. Another, on the phone with a patrolman, cried in alarm, “I heard it on the radio. Then I went to the roof and I could see the smoke from the bombs, drifting over toward New York. What shall I do?”(1)

The War of the Worlds broadcast will perhaps forever remain one of the most telling examples of the power of context, and in more ways than one. Whether listeners tuned in after the introduction or happened to miss the declaimers, the convincing portrayal was enough to send waves of fear across the country. In the context of breaking news, fiction appeared alarmingly factual.

But also, I think it is fair to ask whether such a reaction could have even taken place outside of the context in which this “breaking news” was heard. In 1938, the global situation was such that an unfolding crisis, and subsequent radio interruption, was not altogether implausible. Furthermore, radio was at that time the primary source for news and information. Nowadays, if we heard troubling news on the radio, the first thing we would do is check it out further on the Internet or television. We are much too cynical to be taken in by such a tale today.

But herein lies an interesting attitude. When thinking about such an incredible example of hoax and gullibility, I suspect many of us have a similar outlook: We are much less vulnerable to fallacy masquerading itself as truth in today’s day and age. But could this not also be a false and dangerous assumption? The War of the Worlds broadcast might no longer fool us, but are we really so much closer to recognizing fact from fallacy?

Just because we reject stories, suspect history, and are well aware that reality television is not reality hardly means that we are less susceptible to deception. When we live cynically yet choose our beliefs by preference, there is deception in our approach to truth itself, which is just as hazardous as believing in Martians because you heard it over the radio. In the words of the prophet Amos, we have fled from a lion only to meet a bear.

From context to context, the tests of truth do not change and must be employed. For regardless of context, the effects of believing a lie are always injurious to life. As Ravi Zacharias notes, “To be handcuffed by a lie is the worst of all imprisonments.” Whether we are claiming Martians landed in 1938 or making the truth claim that there is no such thing as truth, reason leads us to check the correspondence of a claim with reality, and the coherence of the assertions. Our truth claims must be tested before they are believed—and subsequently, they must be lived out.

Jesus, whom Christians prepare to meet again this Advent as one who came near, made some tremendous claims about himself. The reassuring thing is that he also asked us to test these claims and not simply take his word: “Who do you say that I am?” In claiming an answer, we must not abandon fundamental tests of truth—tests that are inherent in the questions Jesus is asking. In the breaking news of the church this Advent season might we approach the Child willing to respond fairly, knowing there are certain responses that are just not left open to us, and ready to fully live the truth we proclaim.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) “Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact,” The New York Times, Oct. 31, 1938.

Garrison Keillor’s description of Aunt Marie is one I cannot shake this season. Repeatedly, she comes to mind in discordant moments of Christmas preparation, somewhere between errands at the mall and lyrics that put a stop to them: “Long lay the world in sin and error pining,/ Till he appeared, and the soul felt its worth.” No description of the lofty Christian notion of the Incarnation more readily makes the common stressors of Christmas seem less robust. And yet, Aunt Marie, with her “fat little legs” and “her heavy, fur-collared coat,” has made a serious attempt to wrestle me back down to a sad, human, earthly reality. Keillor writes:

“She knew that death was only a door to the kingdom where Jesus would welcome her, there would be no crying there, no suffering, but meanwhile she was fat, her heart hurt, and she lived alone with her ill-tempered little dogs, tottering around her dark little house full of Chinese figurines and old Sunday Tribunes. She complained about nobody loving her or wanting her or inviting her to their house for dinner anymore. She sat eating pork roast, mashed potato, creamed asparagus, one Sunday at our house when she said it. We were talking about a trip to the North Shore and suddenly she broke into tears and cried, ‘You don’t care about me. You say you do but you don’t. If I died tomorrow, I don’t know as you’d even go to my funeral.’ I was six. I said, cheerfully, ‘I’d come to your funeral,’ looking at my fat aunt, her blue dress, her string of pearls, her red rouge, the powder on her nose, her mouth full of pork roast, her eyes full of tears.”(1)

Christmas says in color and sentiment what many of us already know: that the world is waiting, groaning for more, longing for redemption and relief, for peace on earth and goodwill to humanity, for release from darkness and loneliness and disillusionment, for God to come near to the world as we know it. Like Aunt Marie, this waiting is sometimes fraught with discomfort; we wait, and we sense a lonely, earthly reality. But Advent forces the experience of waiting into a different light. Our waiting need not be dehumanizing, dispiriting, as waiting often feels.

The New Testament describes it quite differently—not as a difficult means to a better end, but as part of the promise itself. Eugene Peterson writes, “Waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.”(2) Waiting itself is, of course, a reminder that we are earthbound.

But so is Christ.

The Christian’s celebration of Christmas is the assurance that we can wait with good reason. “The word became flesh,” wrote John, “and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). God did not merely come near, he became flesh that could touch weaknesses, experience loneliness, and encounter the lowest moments of being human. He came to be with us, to move through us, to work within us. He came as small and vulnerable as humans come, getting close enough to bear the scars of our outrage and near enough to prove he would stay regardless. He came far nearer than Aunt Marie—or most of us—are yet able to recognize. “That is what incarnation means,” writes Frederick Buechner. “It is untheological. It is unsophisticated. It is undignified. But according to Christianity, it is the way things are. All religions and philosophies that deny the reality or the significance of the material, the fleshly, the earthbound, are themselves denied.”(3)

God became one of us, not to erase every shadow or to undo the difficulties of our humanity, but to be with us in the midst of it all, to transform our spectrum of darkness by bearing a truer depth of light, to enlarge us with the joy of expectancy until the fullness of time when every hope has come to pass.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home (New York: Viking, 1987), xxi-xxii.

(2) Eugene Peterson, The Message, Romans 8:24-25.

(3) Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 169.

Before coming to the narrative of Christ’s birth, there is a dramatic conversation which takes place between a priest called Zechariah and the angel Gabriel. One day Zechariah was serving in the temple when the angel Gabriel appeared to him.(1) Zechariah was very afraid but Gabriel spoke to him saying, ‘Do not be afraid. Your prayer has been heard.’ Gabriel continued to tell Zechariah that he and his wife would have a son and they were to name him John. Ultimately, John would be the one to prepare people for the Lord Jesus.

Instead of rejoicing over the news brought to him from Gabriel, Zechariah objects, “How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years.” Gabriel responds by explaining to Zechariah precisely to whom he is speaking and also cites the authority on which he bears this news:

“I am Gabriel and I stand in the presence of God, and I was sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things take place, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time.”

One only needs to read the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel to find out that this promise from the Lord was fulfilled. Elizabeth and Zechariah have a baby boy and they name him John. It is only after the naming of John that Zechariah is able to speak again.

There are many aspects of this story that are remarkable. First is the context in which the story takes place: the people of Israel, of whom Zechariah and Elizabeth were a part, have not heard from God for a period of roughly 400 years! When Gabriel appears to Zechariah, it is highly likely that this is the first time Zechariah has heard from God in such a way.

To make theological matters even more complicated for Zechariah, Gabriel’s second statement, after telling him to not be afraid, is ‘Your prayer has been heard.’ There is deep irony in this statement primarily because of the theological background leading up to this conversation. For all of Zechariah’s life, he had never heard God’s voice like this. The very act of God speaking to him would seem preposterous. Therefore, it is understandable why Zechariah questions Gabriel. Zechariah and his people have prayed to God, many for their entire lives, and they have never heard anything. How could Zechariah be sure this was truly a message from the Lord? This encounter undoubtedly marked a watershed moment, not only for Zechariah, but for God’s people and the entire world. God would speak now and man would be silent.

God’s silence is often a challenge to belief. One point I glean from the early part of this story is that God’s silence does not necessarily imply that God is inactive. In Israel’s case, God had been silent for years, yet in this angelic encounter, nearly the first words of instruction from the Lord are, ‘Your prayer has been heard.’ For those of us who are immersed in the urgency of the digital world, we would do well to heed the implicit lesson of patience found in this story. God had been silent for a long time, but God was listening. There are times in our lives in which we do not hear God’s voice. Gabriel’s words tell us that although we might not hear God speaking, God is still listening.

After Zechariah objects to the seemingly audacious promise given from the Lord, Gabriel points out that it is not on his own authority that he speaks, but God’s. Implicit in Gabriel’s statement is the reality that God is bringing help to Israel, not because of what Zechariah or Elizabeth have done, but rather because of who God is. Historically speaking, God was the one who helped, rescued, and saved Israel countless times. The people of Israel knew this history well and they also knew why God had reached down and helped them. This much was clear in the mind of Israel: God’s salvation came only because of God’s character. God’s saving power came, not because of humanity’s effort, but because of God’s nature to save.

Gabriel then tells Zechariah that he will be silent. This is what strikes me most about the story: Gabriel appears to Zechariah in a time during which the people of Israel had not heard from God in years. The Lord speaks to Zechariah and tells him that God will act and fulfill his promise, but while He does so, Zechariah will be silent.

Generally I have viewed the silence of Zechariah as a punishment for not believing in God, and I think that this may well be true. But I also see this act of silence pointing to something deeper than one man receiving a punishment from God for not believing, and here’s why: The people of Israel knew that God had helped them; they knew why God had helped them and they also had learned how God had worked in history. Over time they had realized that God’s grace and salvation would be worked out through quietness and trust. Israel’s strength lay not in activity and being busy, but in silence. This was how God worked.

Zechariah’s silence is a symbol of God’s salvation. John’s life was spent concentrated on preparing people for Christ, the means by which people could be saved. But before John came, the Lord visited his father through Gabriel, telling Zechariah that He had heard his prayer, and was going to rescue his people not in a flurry of human activity, but in a way in which people could only watch him work and hear him speak. Perhaps one of the vital lessons we can learn from the Christmas story is to prioritize silence before God. At the very least, being quiet will remind us of a greater time, one of the greatest in history, when God spoke and humankind was there only to watch and listen.

Nathan Betts is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Toronto, Canada.

(1) See Luke 1.

Nicodemus was confused. He had come to Jesus under the secrecy of the night professing what he thought he knew: “Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him.”(1) Nicodemus was a Pharisee in the time of Jesus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. He was highly regarded, which most likely explains the veil of night by which he sought to meet the controversial rabbi. He did not want to draw unnecessary attention to his consideration of Jesus. Even so, it was perhaps an act of faith to seek out the divisive young man from Galilee, an act of humility to grapple with a message that thoroughly confused him, a message that seemed to call the very basis of his faith into question.

In reply to Nicodemus’s admission that night, Jesus offered one of his own: “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.” The ensuing conversation is one of mystery and semantics.

“How can a man be born when he is old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb.”

Again Jesus answered curiously, “I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”(2)

Nicodemus replied as many of us reply on a journey of faith, belief, doubt, and confusion: as one reaching for light to see dim outlines of a picture before him. “How can this be?” he asked, and the conversation that followed showed a man not asking hypothetically but actually, as one really longing to understand the logistics of rebirth. Nicodemus came to Jesus in the obscurity of darkness and found himself confronted by a conversation about flesh and spirit and light: “[W]hoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.”

G.K. Chesterton once said that it is important for the landlady who is considering a lodger to know his income, but it is more important to know his philosophy. Likewise, for the general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy’s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy’s worldview. “[T]he question” writes Chesterton, “is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run, anything else affects them.”(3) The big picture is always the most important picture. And when the picture is God, God outgrows every frame through which our eyes begin to see the divine. In a manner reminiscent of the exchange between Aslan and Lucy, God as noun, verb, and all always moves beyond the God we imagine.

“Aslan,” said Lucy, “You’re bigger.”

“I am not,” said the great lion. “But every year you grow; you will find me bigger.”

For Nicodemus, the entire picture was turned on its head. Everything he knew was cast into shadows by the light who stood before him. “How can this be?” are the last words we hear from Nicodemus this night. The darkened exchange of Christ and the Pharisee is one that ends without clarity. Yet true to our own lives, his confusion does not seem to disperse in the expanse of one chapter. There are two more references to Nicodemus in John’s Gospel, and they suggest that that this initial meeting with Jesus was the beginning of something of a journey. In the darkness of faith, Nicodemus seemed to discover the God who is there, the light who draws us further up and further in, until standing before the divine, we ourselves are reborn.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) John 3:2.

(2) John 3:3-21.

(3) G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2003), 15.

In a certain home town there lived a cobbler, Martin Avdeitch by name. He lived in a small basement room whose one window looked out onto the street, and all he could see were the feet of people passing by. But since there was hardly a pair of boots that had not been in his hands at one time for repair, Martin recognized each person by his shoes. Day after day, he would work in his shop, watching boots pass by. One day he found himself consumed with the hope of a dream that he would find the Lord’s feet outside his window. Instead, he found a lingering pair of worn boots belonging to an old soldier. Though at first disappointed, Martin realized the old man might be hungry and invited him inside to a warm fire and some tea. He had other visitors that evening, and though sadly none were Christ, he let them in also. Sitting down at the end of day, Martin heard a voice whisper his name as he read the words: “I was hungry and you gave me meat; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you took me in. Inasmuch as you did for the least of these, you did unto me.”(1)

Every Christmas, our family reads the story of Martin the Cobbler as an aid to our celebration. Tolstoy’s words offer something of a creative attempt to capture the wonder of a God who comes near and helps us picture the gift of Christ among us in accessible terms. Notably, the story was originally titled, Where God Is, Love Is.

The Christian story that informs the Christian calendar gives its followers time and opportunity to remember the coming of Christ in a specific context—in Bethlehem, in the Nativity, in the first Christmas. But it also presents repeated opportunities and reminders to prepare for the coming of Christ again and again. Like Martin eagerly waiting at the window, the Christian worldview is one that asks of every day of every year: How will Christ come near today? Will I wait for him? Am I ready for him? Am I even expecting to find him? We are reminded to keep watch, to be prepared, and to continually ready our hearts and minds for the one who is already near. At the same time, the Christian story would also have us to remember how unexpectedly Christ at times appears—as a baby in Bethlehem, a man on a cross, as a woman in need.

In the book of Titus, we read that “the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all people.” How and where will grace show up this week? In order to stay alert to the rich possibilities, perhaps we need to keep before us the radical thought of all that God has offered: a Christ child who comes down to us, a redeemer willing to die for us, a God willing to redefine what is near—all so that we might be where God is. Christianity is not an escape system for us to avoid reality, to live above it, or to be able to redefine it. Christianity is a way that leads the world to grasp what reality is and, by God’s grace and help, to navigate through it to our eternal home in God’s presence.

The story God has given indeed feeds the hungry, takes in the stranger, and orients the resident alien who is ever-looking homeward. The focus of Christ’s coming is the message of Immanuel—God is with us. The focus of Christ’s earthly ministry is the declaration of the cross—God is for us. And the focus of Christ’s resurrection is the promise of a future and his imminent return—God will bring us safely home. Until then, God is among us, even when it seems most unlikely.

Stuart McAllister is regional director for the Americas at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Story told in Leo Tolstoy’s, Walk in the Light While There Is Light and Twenty-three Tales (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003).

In the process of moving and reorganizing some bookshelves in the middle of October, I recovered something long out of place. Carved out of olive wood, a small nativity had been left behind from last year’s Christmas. I held it in my hand and cringed at the thought of digging through boxes in the garage long buried by post-Christmas storage. At this point, it seemed better to be two months early in setting it up than ten months late in packing it away.

Strangely enough, my decision then coincided with a friend’s mentioning of a good Christmas quote. Advent was suddenly all around me. In a Christmas sermon given December 2, 1928, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, who look forward to something greater to come. For these, it is enough to wait in humble fear until the Holy One himself comes down to us, God in the child in the manger. God comes. The Lord Jesus comes. Christmas comes. Christians rejoice!” To be early with my Nativity scene suddenly seemed a wise, but convicting thought. I had kept it around for the sake of convenience, what about for the sake of waiting? If Advent reminds us that we are waiting in December, what reminds us that we are waiting in October or February?

The story of the Nativity, though beautiful and familiar, and admittedly far-reaching, is as easily put out of our minds as Christmas decorations are put in boxes. On certain sides of the calendar, a nativity scene looks amiss. Sitting on my mantle in the fall or the spring, it seems somehow away from home, far from lights and greenery, longing for Christmas fanfare. But looking at it with thoughts of Advent near, I am struck by the irony that longing is often precisely the sentiment I am holding amidst the burgeoning lights, greens, and fanfare of Christmas.

As Bonhoeffer continues, “When once again Christmas comes and we hear the familiar carols and sing the Christmas hymns, something happens to us… The hardest heart is softened. We recall our own childhood. We feel again how we then felt, especially if we were separated from a mother. A kind of homesickness comes over us for past times, distant places, and yes, a blessed longing for a world without violence or hardness of heart. But there is something more—a longing for the safe lodging of the everlasting Father.”(1)

Unlike any other month, December weighs on my soul the gift and the difficulty of waiting. In the cold and dead of winter, tragedies seem to sting further, healing for the broken parts of my life and for the people I love seems harder to reach. When it comes to things that are deep and important, peace and goodness on the earth, freedom from suffering, waiting is hard, even painful. But in these moments, I am remembering that I am troubled in soul and looking for something greater. In the familiar hymns that play wherever I go, I remember that I am poor and imperfect and waiting for the God who comes down to us, and I hear again the gentle promise of a knock at the door. Like the Nativity scene on my mantle in June or October, I embody a strange hope in this sense of waiting. I see a home with tears and sorrow, but I also see in this home the signs of a day when tears will be wiped dry. Advent is about waiting for the one who embraced sorrow and body to show us the fullness of being home, present, and real. It is not December that reminds us we are longing for God to come nearer, but the Nativity of God, the Incarnation of Christ. For each day is touched by the promise that in this very place Jesus has already done so, and that he will again come breaking through, into our world, into our longing, into our sin and deaths.

Every day, despite its location on the calendar, or the headlines on the news, a still, small voice answers our cry persuasively here and now, “Behold. I stand at the door and knock.”

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Edwin Robertson, Ed., Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005).

“The kingdom of God is for the gullible,” I read recently. “You enter by putting an end to all your questions.”

It is true that Jesus moved all over Judea pronouncing the reign of God and the kingdom of heaven as if it were a notion he wanted the simplest soul to get his mind around. But simplicity never seemed what crowds walked away with. With looming paradox in every statement, he made it clear that this kingdom was approaching, that it was here, that it was among us, that they needed to enter it, that they need to wait for it, that they desperately need the one who reigns within it. He insisted, the kingdom “has come near you” (Luke 10:9). Yet he pled to the Father, “Thy kingdom come” (Matthew 6:10). Even in his metaphors, the contrast of so many different and dynamic realities turned the clarity of any individual picture into a great and ambiguous portrait. He assigned the kingdom imagery such as a mustard seed, a treasure in a field, a great banquet, yeast and pearls, among others.

Contrary to putting an end to one’s questions with a childish simplicity, the kingdom of God incites inquiry all the more. What is the nature of this kingdom? Can it be all of these things? Who is this messenger? And what kind of proclamation requires the herald to pour out his very life to tell it? Whatever this kingdom is, it unmistakably introduces to a world far different from the one around us, one we cannot quite get our minds around, with tensions and dynamisms reminiscent of the promise of God to answer our cries “with great and unsearchable things you do not know.”(1) But one thing it absolutely does not do is ask us to stop thinking or to stop trying to reconcile this curious kingdom Jesus describes with the curious world around us. His is certainly a kingdom that challenges any sort of thoughtless, gullible obedience, that compels not blindness or gullibility but sight. It is a kingdom with a king whose very authority exposes present obsessions as wood and reforms numbed minds with great and surprising reversals of life as a gift.

Jesus pointed crowds to a God who opens the eyes of the blind and raises the dead, who claims the last will be the first and the servant is the greatest. But lest we are tempted to leave his statements as hopeful moralisms, his proclamations did not cease with mere words. He put these claims into equally curious action, placing this kingdom before the crowds in such a way that would have absolutely stymied contemporary attempts to dismiss his life as mere religion, abstraction, gullibility, or sentimentality. Even his opposition saw him as a certain and credible threat to their own power and authority:

“Then the whole assembly rose and led Jesus off to Pilate. And they began to accuse him, saying, ‘We have found this man subverting our nation. He opposes payment of taxes to Caesar and claims to be Christ, a king.’

So Pilate asked Jesus, ‘Are you the king of the Jews?’

‘Yes, it is as you say,’ Jesus replied.

Then Pilate announced to the chief priests and the crowd, ‘I find no basis for a charge against this man.’

But they insisted, ‘He stirs up the people all over Judea by his teaching.  He started in Galilee and has come all the way here…’ So with loud shouts they insistently demanded that he be crucified, and their shouts prevailed.”(2)  The way of proclamation led to the way of the passion, the path of commotion to the path of accusation, a road strewn with signs of the authority of another kingdom to a road that demanded death and mocked a king.

It is tempting to lose sight of this revolutionary figure in the sentimentalism of Christmas manger scenes and familiar carols. And yet this is the child born into our world: one who is still subverting nations and threatening our every sense of authority. The kingdom he proclaimed in birth and in death mercifully continues to unravel our own. His is not a kingdom for the gullible, nor for the faint of heart and sight. Yet, both heart and sight he provides for the weary, taking us beyond familiar borders of the world we know to the very threshold of the good and hopeful kingdom of God, where in both our longing to see in fullness and in our relishing here and now, we discover the one who reigns.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Jeremiah 33:3.

(2) Luke 23:1-23, emphasis mine.

Those of us who make our home in the Northern Hemisphere must welcome the encroaching darkness of the winter months. At the height of winter in Kotzebue, Alaska, for example, daylight is but a mere two hours. Where I live, the light begins to recede around 4:30 PM. When the winter sun is out it simply rides the southern horizon with a distant, hazy glow.

Perhaps it seems strange to some, but I love the shorter-days and the darkening skies of winter. For me, the darkness of winter invokes nostalgia for the days of huddling around the fireplace, hot coffee, and curling up with a good book. Indeed, there are some gifts that can only be enjoyed in the darkness of winter and in this season of lessening light.

Of course, darkness and night evoke ominous images as well. Pre-Christian inhabitants of the Northern Hemisphere—who did not separate natural phenomenon from their religious and spiritual understanding—saw the departing sunlight as the fleeing away of what they believed was the Sun God. Darkness indicated distance from this receding god and what followed was a loss of hope, the presence of absence and the cessation of life.(1) Like these ancient peoples, darkness often creates fear. We fear what we cannot see in the dark, and what is seen inhabits the mysterious realm of shadows. Darkness has always represented chaos, evil, and death, and therefore is rarely thought of in either romantic or nostalgic terms.

For many—even those who live in sun-filled hemispheres—the darkness of life is a daily nightmare. Despair, chronic loneliness, doubt, and isolation conspire to prevent even the dimmest light. The darkness that comes only as a visitor during the night is for many a perpetual reality. Is there any reason to hope that the light might be found even in these dark places?

It is not by accident that the season of Advent for Christians coincides with the earthly season of fading light and increasing darkness. With its focus on waiting, repentance, and longing, Christians view Advent as a season of somber reflection. Yet, even as the light recedes in winter, the season of Advent offers surprising gifts in the shorter days, in the womb of pregnant possibility, and in the often anxious anticipation that accompanies waiting in the darkness. Those pre-Christian peoples who watched their sun-god disappear found that there were gifts that could be had even in this dark season. The wheels of carts used for hauling and carrying goods, were taken off and decorated with greens and garlands. Those ordinary objects now hung on their walls as mementos of beauty and hope. Taking the wheels off of their carts meant the cessation of work and a time to watch and wait. As Gertrud Muller Nelson writes about this ancient ritual, “Slowly, slowly they wooed the sun-god back. And light followed darkness. Morning came earlier. The festivals announced the return of hope after primal darkness.”(2)

While the dark is mysterious and often ominous, it is also a place of unexpected treasures. As one author notes, “[S]pring bulbs and summer seeds come to life in the unlit places underground. Costly jewel stones lie embedded in the dark interiors of ordinary rocks. Oil, gas, and coal reserves lie far beneath the light of the earth’s surface. The dark depths of the ocean teem with life.”(3) Indeed, unique gifts from earth, sky, and sea can only be observed in the dark.

Spiritual gifts, too, often emerge out of the darkness. The writer of Genesis paints a picture of the Spirit of God hovering over the primordial chaos and the darkness that covered the surface of the deep. Out of the darkness of chaos came the light of creation. The covenant promises of God to give children and land to Abram were forged “when the sun was going down…and terror and great darkness fell upon him.” Moses received the Law in the “thick darkness where God was.” God’s abiding presence was the gift from the darkness. Speaking through the prophet Isaiah, the God of Israel promises: “I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the Lord, the God of Israel, who summons you by name.” Indeed, the long-awaited Messiah would be revealed to those “who walk in darkness” and who “live in a dark land.”(4) Unlike the sun-god of the pre-Christian understanding, the God of the biblical writers did not flee as the sun faded away, but could be found in the darkest and remotest places.

For those who dwell in the dark season of despair or discouragement, the promise of treasures of darkness may spark a light of hope. “The recovery of hope,” writes Muller Nelson, “can only be accomplished when we have had the courage to stop and wait and engage fully in the winter of our dark longing.”(5)

The hope of Advent is that God is in the darkness with us even though our experience of God may seem as clear as shifting shadow. The hope of Advent is that God’s coming near to us in the person of Jesus is not hindered by the darkness of this world or of our own lives. We may fear our dark despair hides us from God, but the treasure of God’s presence waits even there—for darkness is as light to God.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Gertrud Muller Nelson, To Dance With God: Family Ritual and Community Celebration (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1986), 63.

(2) Ibid., 63.

(3) Sally Breedlove, Choosing Rest: Cultivating a Sunday Heart in a Monday World (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2002), 133.

(4) Genesis 15:12; Exodus 20:21; Deuteronomy 5:22; Isaiah 45:3; Isaiah 9:2.

(5) Gertrud Muller Nelson, 63.

“You can’t stop stories being told,” Dr. Parnassus tells his relentless foe with religious assurance in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. The world of belief-systems and worldviews is indeed a complicated playground of stories, storytellers, and allegiances—and this is one film which certainly attests to that complicated dance. What makes the interplay of story most complicated is perhaps what is often our inability to name or even to perceive these interacting powers in the first place. That which permeates our surroundings, subconsciously molds our understanding, and continuously informs our vision of reality, is not always easy to articulate. The dominate culture shapes our world in ways we seldom even realize, and often in ways we cannot realize, until something outside of our culture comes along and introduces us, and the scales fall from our eyes.

Further complicating the great arena of narratives is the fact that we often do not even recognize certain systems for the metanarratives that they are, or else we grossly underestimate the story’s power on our own. Whatever version or versions of the story we utilize to understand human history—atheism, capitalism, pluralism, consumerism—their roots run very deep in the human soul. This is why Bishop Kenneth Carder can refer to the global market economy as a “dominant god,” or consumerism, economism, and nationalism as religions.(1) These deeply rooted ideologies are challenged only when a different ideology or imagination comes knocking, when a different faith-system comes along and upsets the imagination that powerfully orders our world.

This is perhaps one reason that the biblical imagination presented in Scripture calls again and again to remember the story, to tell of the acts of God in history, and to bear in mind and vision the one who is near. For into this world of belief-systems and worldviews, God tells the story of creation and the pursuit of its redemption, and then Christ comes in our own flesh and proclaims a kingdom entirely other. The narrative imagination we discover in Scripture introduces us not only to a new world but a world that jarringly shows us our own.

The signs and scenes leading to the incarnation alone challenge many of our cultural norms, turning upside down ideas of authority, power, and glory, presenting us a kingdom that reverses everything we know. What kind of a king crouches down to his subjects to feed the masses or wash their feet? What kind of a leader tells those under him that the way to the top requires a dedication to the bottom? What kind of God comes as child and leaves on a cross? What kind of meal lifts us to another kingdom where we are brought into the presence of the host and asked to taste him? Yet these are the stories he told and Christians tell; this is the imagination he gives us to see him, the world, our selves and neighbors. “And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me’” (Luke 22:19). Not long after their meal, his physical body was broken, too.

The story of the Christian is one that remembers the very first and the very last moments of a rabbi and his disciples—a child born, a teacher present, a meal shared, a lamb revealed, feet washed by one who claimed to be both king and servant. It is a story that invites its hearers into a kingdom entirely different than the many stories before them, connecting them with a God who somehow reigns within a realm that is here and now, and also approaching. In the Lord’s Supper, Christians are literally “taking in” this biblical imagination, which unites followers with Christ in such a way that helps us to live as he lived in a world of stories.

When the apostle Paul called early followers of Christ not to be conformed to this world but to be transformed by the renewing of their minds so that they might discern what is the will of God—”what is good and acceptable and perfect,” he was reminding them that there are overlapping and contradicting stories all around them, but that it is the story of God that earns the role of orienting narrative. In other words, Christ does not leave his followers with the option of living unaware of all the subconscious ways in which we are formed by the world of stories. Living into the kingdom of God means recognizing the power of God’s story beside every competing narrative—not necessarily shutting each one out, but interpreting every other story through the Story. Living further into the biblical imagination presented in Scripture, the Christian’s very life, like that of Christ’s, shows the world the subversive power of an imagination that moves far beyond the systems of “postmodernism,” “consumerism,” and “nationalism.”

Whether Christian, atheist, or Hindu, no one can avoid being in the world. We cannot escape the world’s formative stories, nor should we want to escape the particular place where we have been planted.(3) Yet, nor do we want it to become so much our home that we cannot see all the dust on the windows or feel the draft of a roofless shelter. For the Christian, the more we find ourselves living into the imagination of this different kingdom, a world breathed by the Father, proclaimed by Christ, and revealed by the Spirit, the unchallenged, unseen storylines of our worlds come sharply into focus. And the more we taste and see of the goodness of God, the more we taste and see of Christ in the land of the living. Like Paul, at times something like scales fall from our eyes and the Spirit compels us to get up and re-experience our baptisms, going further into the biblical imagination, where our voices regain strength in telling and retelling the unstoppable story.(4)

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Kenneth Carder, “Market and Mission: Competing Visions for Transforming Ministry,” Lecture, Duke Divinity School, Oct. 16, 2001, 1.

(2) Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1995), 95.

(3) Jesus himself prayed, “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world, but I ask that you protect them from the evil one” (John 17:15).

(4) “And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored. Then he got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, he regained his strength” (Acts 9:18-19).

It is tempting to look at the ancients of Israel, as they wandered and grumbled in a desert for forty years, and wonder at their behavior—or else, question the storyline, which leaves a few questions. These people are key participants in mouth-dropping events at the Red Sea, where the God who has chosen them offers a display of all that means. These same people then come to doubt God’s presence among them, God’s power, God’s concern, God’s plan for their lives. Did they really believe they could be as moved and cared for by a golden ornament, molded at their own hands, as they were with the God who split open the Red Sea?

Whether a casual or careful reader of Israel’s story, it is tempting to keep their behavior at a healthy distance, as if in its ancient context, it is wholly un-relatable to our own. But imagining that Israel’s actions are in complete contrast with mine, I repeatedly discover, is a stretch by any imagination. The behavior of the Israelites is still among us; at times, is it frustratingly close to home.

Though the specific events of Egypt could have similarly been held at a distance by the psalmist who was writing years later, the writer nonetheless stood poised to remember the events of Israel’s past so as to see his present situation more clearly. As if forging it in his own memory, the psalmist speaks bluntly of Israel’s experience in the desert: “Then they despised the pleasant land; they did not believe his promise” (106:24).

What does it take to come to despise what once seemed promising? What would it take for you to refuse to believe the one thing you want to believe most? When hopes are dashed in trying places, I don’t believe their reaction to the desert is so far removed from our own. The Israelites were not unusually slow in understanding; they were no more stubborn than you or I am. But they were entirely disappointed; all they longed for seemed altogether unreachable. They could not believe that the wilderness was the way to Canaan. They could not see how their current trouble was consistent with a God who loved them; they could not see how their pain could possibly work for good in the end. Who among us cannot at some point relate?

Whether people of faith or not, we long for someone or something or some place that can make right what is wrong in this world, what is wrong in our lives. And yet, carrying ideas of what that someone or something will look like, and not finding it, we end up doubting the promising thought we once held on to with hope. When the route we see in front of us seems irreconcilable with the place we thought we were going, we come to despise what once seemed hopeful, holding in its place shattered expectations, fear, and anger.

When Jesus healed a man who was called Legion because he was possessed with so many demons, the townspeople had a peculiar response. Mark describes the scene and its aftermath as a crowd began to gather. “When they came to Jesus, they saw the man who had been possessed by the legion of demons, sitting there, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid” (5:15).

This man was someone they were familiar with; the crowd actually recognized him. He was the one they saw dodging in and out of nearby caves, living as a total recluse, cast out of society, an outcast even of his own mind. Yet, seeing the one they were used to avoiding suddenly dressed and in his right mind evoked within them, not delight or amazement, not thanks or hopefulness, but fear. No one suspected that this was a shadow of all they longed for themselves. Seeing Jesus, the instrument of healing—the one who set right what was wrong—they were simply afraid. And they begged him to leave.

As the Israelites beheld the desert and the townspeople beheld Legion, both missed what God was doing because they were troubled by the failures of their imagination. It brings quiet inquiries to mind. Do we not still oscillate between being too uncomfortable to trust and too comfortable to believe? How do we guard against missing our deepest hope, though we fear? And how do we not come to despise what once seemed promising, though we stand broken or disappointed in the wilderness?

Like the psalmist, we might stand poised to remember, seeing God in history, seeing ourselves, seeing today—with imagination, with thanksgiving. Though I am tempted to keep the behavior of those who have gone before me at a distance, I am comforted by the proximity of God throughout their story, continually drawing them nearer, even in the desert. Though they grumbled and failed and begged God to leave, God continued to lead them, in mercy breaking each idol they would have settled for, prying from their hands the things that blocked their view of the promise God would not forget.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

A New York Times column recently posed the question “Do moralists make bad novelists?” Two novelists, Alison Gregory and Pankaj Mishra respectively, provided brief responses. Though both writers grapple with the question in a distinctive manner, they are unified on one thought: Morality in the context of a story should be inherent, not explicit. The concrete circumstances of the story ought to allow the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. And, both writers agree, ambiguity is usually a more suitable vehicle for such a task than certainty. Gregory sums up this conclusion well: “It’s not that fiction should be written by amoral authors — in fact, I would argue that novels actively unconcerned with which thoughts and behaviors are worth having are themselves not worth reading — but that their methods ought to be suggestive rather than forthright. Fiction should expose us to a conscience, not a conviction.”(1)

Allowing the circumstances of a story to speak for themselves can lead authors, their characters, and their readers in surprising directions, directions that don’t necessarily fit the assumptions of all three. This is when books get really interesting. When an author’s, a character’s, a reader’s assumptions smack against the hard surfaces of reality this can be a means to an enlarged perspective, an invitation to an outlook that is more subtle, generous, and humane. But this kind of undertaking requires courage. We seldom speak of great writers as brave. We should. Telling the truth flies in the face of fashion, ideology, vanity, and self-interest.

Asked if he is religious, author Jeffrey Eugenides responded, “I don’t think you should be interested in searching for the truth if you don’t think maybe you’ll find the truth.” One of the characters from his latest book, The Marriage Plot, discovers this first-hand. With a last name that is every bit as dramatic as his author’s, Mitchell Grammaticus sets his sights on Calcutta, India, where he plans to volunteer at the Sisters of Charity, Mother Teresa’s home for the sick and the dying. The year is 1982 and Mitchell has just graduated from Brown University. Mitchell boards the Calcutta-bound plane clutching a tattered copy of Malcolm Muggeridge’s Something Beautiful for God, his heart inflated by lofty ideals of charity and sainthood. The trip is a fascinating failure.

“Mitchell had never so much as changed a baby’s diaper before. He’d never nursed a sick person, or seen anyone die, and now here he was, surrounded by a mass of dying people, and it was his job to help them die at peace, knowing they were loved.”(2) Crowded by this unremitting destitution, Mitchell is pushed well beyond his limits. What is especially confounding to him is his seeming inability to marshal the kind of regard that Mother Teresa and her sisters have for their dying guests. His inner resources simply aren’t up to the task.

The breaking point arrives when Mitchell and another volunteer are trying to bathe a man’s cancer-ravaged body. “Not for a moment did Mitchell believe that the cancerous body on the slab was the body of Christ. He bathed the man as gently as possible, scrubbing around the base of the tumor, which was venomously reddened and seeping blood. He was trying to make the man feel less ashamed, to let him know, in his last days, that he wasn’t alone, not entirely, and that the two strange figures bathing him, however clumsy and inexpert, were nevertheless trying to do their best for him.”(3) But Mitchell’s resolve is fatally weakened. The hard surface of reality is unyielding and simply won’t crack open to reveal some liberating spiritual principle. There is only the slab, the failing body with its failing organs— the whole recalcitrant body of facts that register Mitchell’s impending failure. The ordeal concludes with these stunning sentences: “And Mitchell began to move. Already knowing he would regret this moment for a long time, maybe for the rest of his life, and yet unable to resist the sweet impulse that ran through his every nerve, Mitchell headed to the front of the home, right past Matthew 25:40, and up the steps to the bright, fallen world above.”(4)

Is this a disparagement of the Christian ideal of love? Has this incident simply woken Mitchell up to the sad fact that a human being is nothing more than a sophisticated animal bound to the same fate as whales, mice, and amoebas? Is that all there is to us?

Mitchell shares more than an exotic last name with his author. Following his graduation from Brown University, Jeffrey Eugenides made the same trip to Mother Teresa’s home for the sick and dying as Mitchell. Eugenides’ own experiment in sainthood also ended in failure. What drew both Mitchell and his maker to this humble little nun and her perch in the squalor of India’s poorest slums is the same thing that inspired Malcolm Muggeridge’s unforgettable words as he bade her farewell at the Calcutta railway station: “When the train began to move, and I walked away, I felt as though I were leaving behind me all the beauty and all the joy in the universe. Something of God’s universal love has rubbed off on Mother Teresa, giving her homely features a noticeable luminosity; a shining quality. She has lived so closely with her Lord that the same enchantment clings about her that sent the crowds chasing after him in Jerusalem and Galilee, and made his mere presence seem a harbinger of healing.”(5) Is this “shining quality,” this “noticeable luminosity” real? Or does the “bright, fallen world above” expose Mother Teresa as a fraud?

Eugenides doesn’t answers these questions for the reader. What he does do is offer a concrete demonstration of the fact that it is manifestly impossible to muster this kind of love on our own strength. Mother Teresa and her Sisters of Charity are seeing things in these decrepit bodies that Mitchell just can’t see. Something that doesn’t seem to fit into the “bright, fallen world above” is guiding their hands and feet.

Flannery O’Connor says that the “chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn’t mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.”(6) Confronting the limits of this world, Mitchell appears to be on the threshold of another world. True, he flees, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t brushed shoulders with a deeper reality. And besides, not everyone flees… Mother Teresa is proof of that. Jeffrey Eugenides is portraying a larger universe in this scene. It would have to be a larger universe in order to accommodate Mother Teresa and others like her. And there are many others like her if we would only have eyes to see.

Cameron McAllister is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Alice Gregory and Pankaj Mishra, “Do Moralists Make Bad Novelists?” The New York Times (July 7, 2015), Italics mine.

(2) Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (New York: Picadore, 2011), 297.

(3) Ibid., 319.

(4) Ibid., 321.

(5) Malcolm Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1971), 17-18.

(6) Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Sraus and Giroux, 1957), 175.