Christmas: The God Who Comes

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:5)

The Conflict

We meet the darkness again. Yes, that darkness we met in Advent. The darkness God calls his people to engage to prepare themselves to serve in the new movement God is about initiate to reclaim and restore his hijacked creation to its proper Lord and proper ends.

In Christmas we acknowledge and celebrate the beginning of this movement. Into the darkness the light we glimpsed through God’s call in Advent comes. Up close and in person. Ready to do hand-to-hand combat with its defenses and forces. The verse from John cited above makes this clear.

From the time God began this reclamation and restoration movement with Abraham and Sarah and promised to give them a people whom he would bless and protect and through whom he would bless the world (Gen.12:1-3), he’s been aiming for this moment. “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son” (Gal.4:4). Though humanity had defaulted on God’s goodness and broken his heart, he never acquiesced in that estrangement.

God’s dream in creation was to have a whole world full of people to share his life with in communication, communion, and community. Nothing changed after our senseless and irrational revolt against him. Love drove God to graciously seek after us to reclaim and restore us to participate with him in working towards the fulfillment of that divine dream. Christmas is the culmination and climax of God’s work to achieve his ultimate purpose.

And that means war! As John succinctly puts: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (Jn.1:5).

God Comes in Person

God comes. God comes in person. God comes among us as one of us. God comes among us as a Jewish peasant boy in a backwater village in a small nation that had been the plaything of surrounding powers foe centuries. This is the miracle of Christmas and the mystery of the incarnation.

In his historical context this Jewish peasant, Jesus of Nazareth, God came as what I call a “subversive, counter-revolutionary.” One whose mission is not to effect an abstract, general salvation but rather to overthrow and undo the disordering of his world by humanity’s “original” revolution of sin in the Garden of Eden. This subversion and countering humanity’s revolution is Jesus’ work as the chief agent of this reclamation and restoration movement of God. Jesus lived and died for this work of God. We will see this unfold fully as we move through the rest of the seasons of the church year.

God Comes in Stealth

God comes this way, by stealth, because of the hostility and resistance of his recalcitrant creatures. His world is enemy-occupied territory (C. S. Lewis). It must be reclaimed in a subversive guerilla fashion. According to the dictionary such warfare is: “the use of hit and run tactics by small, mobile groups of irregular forces operating in territory controlled by a hostile, regular force” (cited in Bob Ekblad, Guerilla Gospel, 2). This is certainly the way Jesus and his disciples seem to operate, sans any violence, of course.

God Comes to His People

God’s strategy of using the people he raised through Abraham and Sarah to be instrument to bless the world is one he never gives up on. Even when (almost) all Israel fails and defaults on their commission to be this people. At Christmas God himself comes as one of his own people, living and serving God with a heart of utter loyalty and sheer love for his Father even to a horrible and ignominious death. By such loyalty Jesus shows himself the one faithful Israelite who fulfills the promise made to Abraham and Sarah.

He comes to his people, as one of them, rallying them to “repent” and gather around him as the reconstituted people of Abraham and Sarah. He renews God’s strategy of using this people to bless the world. Jesus’ historical mission is to them. He only marginally and occasionally ministers to Gentiles and offers no strategic plan to reach out to them. That work would fall to the early church (Acts). Regathering an Abrahamic people assures even if it does not plan or implement the outreach to the Gentiles. This people, those Jesus gathers around him, will bless the world. When Jesus declares that first Eucharist at the last supper to be a covenant renewal meal (Mt.26:28) he means just this. His disciples are the nucleus of this new Abrahamic people. With them at that table Jesus’ historical mission is fulfilled. His death as a political miscreant, even if failing to grasp the kind of political threat he actually was, and resurrection as the one to whom all authority in heaven and on earth has been given signal the extraordinary character and mission of his people.

Creation and Eschatology

The first shall be last and vice versa Jesus tells us. If we read the end of the biblical story we discover there the creation story writ large, that is, completed and fulfilled as God intended it. What we find in embryo and different conceptuality in Gen.1-2 we find grown up, as it were, into what it always was.

-creation, purged and renewed of all that hindered it from full flourishing, becomes new creation, the eternal home of God and humanity. The New Jerusalem, the people of God leave heaven and come down to earth forever (Rev.21:1).

-the temple, dwelling for God, the Garden of Eden was in creation, has become the entirety of the new creation in Rev.21 where the New Jerusalem has the shape of only one other biblical structure, the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s temple.

-the Garden of Eden has morphed into a glorious walled city which now encompasses the Garden (Rev.22:1ff.) which receives the glories of human culture and human productivity into it (works of creation).

-God walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden; he makes his home with us on the new creation (Rev.21:3).

These and a number of other such parallels should disabuse of the dualism which underwrites such sentiments as in the song “I’ll Fly Away” and “This earth is not, my home, I’m just a passing through.” This latter sentiment, while understandable and justifiable in the slave settings it arose from, has no place in the thinking and spirituality of comfortable westerners!

So, the last indeed will be first: creation is the beginning of the end, new creation the end of the beginning. The God who comes to his creation to make it his home sanctifies and glorifies the material realm as much as whatever it is we call the “spiritual.” Indeed, the material realm is the essential setting in which our life with God is nurtured and lived out.