“Every normal human birth is a miracle!” Fr. Graves, my college biology professor, would repeatedly exclaim. Think of all the cells, systems, chemical processes interacting and developing according to a pattern embedded in each and every component to bring an infant, alive, whole, well and able to the moment of birth. Life, from onset, is pure gift. Every newborn child is an embodiment of promise, waiting to be nurtured and formed in order to reveal its unique mission and contribution to humanity, to us.
Christmas Eve. We know the story – perhaps too well. Advent has done its best to prepare us, recalling to our mind Isaiah, John the Baptist, Mary, Joseph. God has acted. God is acting. God will act. It is God’s promise and God’s absolute fidelity that give us hope. But, do we realize, really, the love behind the Incarnation?
God makes a home among us, within an occupied people and nation, in the home of a tradesman and a young maiden. If you were God, is this the matrix you would have chosen? Not wealth, palatial estate, privilege, entitlement, every possible advantage of education, advancement and career path to success? What was God thinking?
Even this child’s name, Yeshua, is permeated with promise: God saves! Not with armies, force of power, manipulation of history, but through a tiny baby who is loved into fullness of humanity by us, ordinary folks. By being with us (Emmanuel), as one of us, God offers us a path to healing and liberation – the way of love. In Jesus, God saves.
Jana Buckley says:
“God has acted. God is acting. God will act.”
I like the use of past, present and future tenses attributed to God. Quite often I feel I get focused on just one or another of the tenses, but this brings to mind for me God’s eternal, on-going, infinite nature.