At one point, Jesus had that
intoxicating newborn smell. Like every mother who has ever lived,
Mary knew that uncanny feeling of intimately knowing someone she had
met only moments before.
In fleeting moments, we experience
God afresh and have the momentary sense of remembering something we
never actually forgot. We tap into what St. Augustine called the
“beauty ever-ancient and ever-new,” a beauty so sacred yet so
tender; living and breathing within us. “You were within me,
but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you.”
Today, the opportunities for encountering this beauty are
rare. St. Augustine speaks of these epiphanies with deep reverence.
But today, the story of Jesus seems too long ago and too much of a
stretch to apply to daily life. The language of salvation feels old
and tired and unrelatable.
“We know that the whole creation
has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the
present time,” St. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans. He makes
reference to how the work of Jesus’ birth and death is still being
accomplished. We await the fullness of our redemption as time
unfolds.
Until then, we try to remember what we have heard and seen.
We trudge onward that we may be found in hope amid the clouds of
doubt and the lure of worldly gain. “But hope that is seen is no
hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” says St. Paul. The power of
our faith is directly tied to the tenacity of our hope.
Pop-culture
Christianity has been examined and found lacking. Many leaders have
lost credibility due to personal sin and corruption. The young
especially have turned to a curated faith experience characterized by
emotion-based introspection and a disengagement from any
virtue-based approach to religion. There is widespread
disillusionment and distrust of any institution claiming to have any
bits of spiritual truth in their coffers.
Yet there is hunger. And
where there is hunger, there is searching, praise be to God.
Biblically, even lone rangers have served a purpose.
There
is a movement – or perhaps a manifestation of desperate spiritual
hunger – rumbling among God’s people. The language is vague and
searching but not in a disappointing way. Many of these searchers
haven’t been to their father’s house for supper in a while and they
have grown tired of the repetitive, soul-less formalities. They
forget the language spoken in their homelands, but their hearts
remember the way there. Some of them have wandered hungry for
generations.
The search is circling concentrically around Emmanuel, God with us. This is the only truth that is good enough and big enough to redeem anyone who needs redeeming. To have hope in all of the wayfaring around us is the work of the Christian. To walk with the wayfarers is the work of the saint.
So many imperfect people (many of them
lone rangers) prepared us for the moment of God’s enfleshment. So
many people were faithful to difficult missions, delivered unpopular
messages, went into lands when they’d rather go home. So many
prophets were complete and utter failures. There was no Twitter to
document and broadcast the minute details to the smug masses. And
still, these small people were decimated in the name of “preparing
the way.” All of this chaos and messiness in preparation for what
this baby would do.
But it was such a long wait. And so
many people fell away, lost their initial zeal, turned to other gods,
filled their loneliness and longing with ambition, debauchery, and
quests for self-expression and bored narcissism. Not much has
changed.
Like the Israelites complaining at the manna raining
down from heaven, we have become too familiar with the idea of God
and in the meantime have become completely alienated from the Living God.
His Living Word is dismissed by much of the world as being too
laborious for our enlightened, cultured sensibilities. We don’t
really believe that each tiny thing we do speaks to who we are and
who we worship. The weight of it all (the fidelities and
infidelities) is being added in the scales, personally and
culturally.
If we’ve done a little bit of preparation
ourselves for Christ’s coming, we too can find in ourselves more than
a little curiosity at just how Jesus will accomplish it all. How will he reveal himself to those who have already dismissed him? How will
he convince us all that he is relevant?
Well, he will. If a baby in a
stable can change the course of history slowly but surely over
thousands of years, a king coming in heavenly glory will stop the
show. Because as we know, it isn’t over. So savour these moments
celebrating the baby in the manger. These are the moments for hope.
The days will surely come when each one of us will shed our hope as
one sheds a coat in the sunshine.