Many
years ago, after a family discussion when I was smug and disrespectful, I
recall my mother saying wearily, “I’m sorry, I know your father and I have
never met your expectations.” It’s embarrassing to remember. Anyhow, it’s
odd but I sense the Spirit of God speaking like that in today’s Gospel, as if
pleading for our understanding, “Now this is how the birth of Jesus took place…This
is the way, no other way, sorry to disappoint you but it really is as amazingly
beautiful and as crazy mixed up as this.” So it is that the Christmas story
unfolds each year. “Now this is how the birth of Jesus came about.” And each
year those few words sound so promising, almost like, “Once upon a time…” But
as the story unfolds, things fall apart, and it’s more like a fractured fairy
tale, not at all neat and uncomplicated. There is Mary’s unexplained pregnancy,
Joseph’s sense of betrayal and his decision to put her aside, then an angel’s
reassurance in a dream; you know the rest of the story so well - an uncomfortable
journey for a census, demanded by tax-greedy Romans, not a room to be had, and God’s
Son ends up being delivered in a cattle stall; and very soon these three will
be refugees fleeing to Egypt. All of it seems a glaring reproach to our pretentions,
whatever they may be. But this is how the birth of Jesus God’s only Son took
place. And like those two disciples on the way to Emmaus, we may still wonder, “Did
it have to be like this?”
Perhaps all
of these circumstances were appropriate because God was doing something so
unprecedented in Christ. A sign has been given to us from on high; the sign we’ve
been longing for. And it
is all a sober reminder of who Jesus is, and who he wants to be. For God points
to the precarity and brokenness, the mess and inconsistencies and ambiguities of
our lives, our smelly flesh and guts, and bones, and asks quietly, “May I dwell
there?” And as the angel spoke to Joseph in a dream, so he speaks to us, “Do
not be afraid. Instead, go to the low stable of your weakness and you will find me
waiting for you there.” You see the Christmas story is after all harsh and
terrible, full of struggle, with the shadow of the cross falling over it.* Jesus enters our world anonymously,
clandestinely, born to insignificant parents from a nowhere town because like a
warrior he is slipping in behind enemy lines*
in order to subvert the way we thought things were supposed to be.
We call
this the scandal of the Incarnation - that God Most High has become God most
low, small, hidden, weak, and unremarkable; this is God’s embrace
of all that we are in its beauty as well as its shoddiness. And still, each
Christmas the reality of it all may come as a surprise. Why would God do this? The
early Church struggled with it for centuries. Who is Jesus? Was he divine
pretending to be human? Human at one time, divine at another? Finally, the
conclusion is reached after praying, and searching the Scriptures – no, Jesus is
fully human, fully divine. But how? Even centuries later Catherine of Siena
will call God foolish for it - “You’ve fallen in love with what you created.”
God has lost himself in love. Only the foolish extravagance of his love for us
can explain any of it, whether gurgling in the manger or disfigured and
blood-drenched on the cross, nowhere is God more divine than in his weakness, in
his humility and humiliation.*
Many of us will remember our Br.
David West. He was an artist who had worked in the advertising department of a large department store in Texas before entering the monastery. David loved to tell the story of
the time he was assigned to do a watercolor painting of a single rose for an ad
campaign. He had struggled with it all evening; after his final attempt, he
turned the paper over in desperation and discovered there in what had bled
through the paper the perfect rose. He added a few touches and that was it.
With Mary and Joseph and David, we too must learn to trust upside-downness and continue
searching for the Rose – hoping against hope, turning things over, and discovering
the beauty of God.
Mary and Joseph show us that there is
no security but faith and loving surrender to God. For his part, God reveals that
he cannot be enfleshed without our faith and the cooperation of our weakness. It
is what he longs for, delights in, and depends on in order to be with us. And he
wants to make new Bethlehems in us,* if we will make room for him. But how slow we are to understand that confusion
is grace, how reluctant to trust that God wants to turn things over and show us
beautiful opportunities for his grace in the mess. If we await neatness or easy
success and fanfare, we will always be disappointed. This
is how the birth of Jesus comes about: God places a baby in our midst and says,
“Here I am - in the smallness of your reality.” Perhaps it is like an apology
after all.
Everything’s not OK. It’s much better than that: everything is falling apart around us, within us. But this is great, good news, for in Christ we have been grasped by the love of God and drawn irrevocably into the fullness of his desire for us. For God has, at last, heeded the lonely cry of his creatures, “Please surrender yourself! Lower the heavens. Come down to us.” And he begs for us to surrender to him in return, even as he astounds us, perhaps even disappoints us, with his unpretentiousness and weakness. A Rose has blossomed from Mary’s tender stem. And from this altar we receive his self-surrender to us in a scrap of bread, rose-red with his precious blood.
****References: Raymond Brown., CS Lewis, Jorgen Moltmann, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Reflection on today's Gospel by one of the monks.
