Reader Writes - December 2019
When working in the Highlands we didn’t get a public holiday on Good Friday; Reformed Scotland thought it safer and more pragmatic to reward people for taking gratitude and celebration seriously by giving them 2 days off at the New Year. There is something to be said for that. The cross is where it is all leading, but it is the incarnation, so audacious and scandalous, that turns the world upside down. God the Creator wired us for eternity; we yearn for spiritual connection, for our maker and God. All religions and spiritualities reach up or out or in to God; but in Christianity –and perhaps Jews would include themselves in this- God uniquely comes to meet us right where we are in our grisly mess.
The apostle John makes this a foundation for his gospel; “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (Jn1:14). John’s opening verse makes clear that the Word is God himself; “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” It doesn’t help to be more spiritual about it than God himself. It is pretty undignified to be born of an unmarried girl, in a stable in an unfamiliar town surrounded by chewing and sighing livestock. Maybe we would take it more seriously if we were more shocked. If we imagined the incarnation in a contemporary setting, even if we chose our own very comfortable country, we could find a teenager who doesn’t speak English, who has been illegally trafficked and now languishes in a desolate unheated warehouse somewhere near a container port.
Whether we romanticize it or shock ourselves, the reality is that God chose to come amongst us and share our muddled lives. On a clear Radnorshire winter’s night when the moon is full you can almost read a book by its light; God among us. But then look down and you might see that blessed light reflected in shards of broken glass; God among our shame and brokenness. That’s what it means for you and me. God made himself flesh, as scripture puts it, and experienced the joy and the cruelty, the hope and the despair, the small triumphs and the unavoidable defeats. His path took him to a Roman cross, but was one of us and shares and sees our deepest longings. That makes all the difference; we have a God who understands us and is involved with us, a relational God who became man, who longs to enter the heart’s manger.
Consider the familiar earth around us with its many props and endless overture of joy. You can’t help crunching on hazel nuts, or acorns or beech mast; it’s been a bumper year. Fat squirrels, happily multiplying mice, insolent pigeons; everyone is very busy down in the hedgerows, and quite possibly not paying too much attention to the neighbourly singing of owls. Such is God’s wild green earth, full of joy and beauty attached to unavoidable decline and tragedy. Let’s crumble the Christmas bread and sip the dark sweet wine, in remembrance, and say Yes to God who walks with us, right alongside us, sometimes carrying us, on an eternal journey. Thank you Lord that we are sown perishable but raised imperishable. Wherever we go we know that you have been there before us, whether in despair or in the heart’s wild excess.
Robert MacCurrach