Third Wednesday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
Christmas fear
by Phil Reinders
“It’s the very nature of wonder to catch us off guard, to circumvent expectations and assumptions. Wonder can’t be packaged, and it can’t be worked up. It requires some sense of being there and some sense of engagement.” Eugene Peterson
Tis the season of endearing but innocuous Christmas pageants where the Christmas story is bubble-wrapped in the most adorable tea-towelled shepherds, bath-robed wisemen, cherub-like angels belting out their off-key alleluias, and an altogether undisturbing baby Jesus, meek and mild.
Trouble is, the nativity is decidedly not cute. There’s a wildness and weirdness to it that matches the God who comes. The very human response throughout the nativity stories, then, is the expression of fear: dumbstruck Zechariah, greatly troubled Mary, unsettled Joseph, and shepherds who are “sore afraid.” We really don’t take stock of how fear is one of the most consistent characters in the Christmas story cast.
Throughout December, we hear carols and commercials cajoling us to enter the wonder of Christmas. They are drippy calls that miss the relationship of wonder and fear, an intimate connection that feels too close for our liking. We’d mostly prefer a safer, sparkly sort of wonder, a bounded form of mystery—present but clearly contained, maybe a little like watching the silverback gorilla at the zoo.
But what if that gorilla breaks out of the zoo enclosure? And what do you do with a God who rips the time-space continuum to come close? Now you sense the appropriate fear that accompanies the mystery of Christmas.
To live in wonder is to live in the middle of life’s overwhelm. Much of the overwhelm is the deluge of goodness, the awe from the reckless generosity of the Creator. Yet a common part of the experience of mystery is bafflement. Psalm 42 sings of hope and trust, but is set against serious confusion and hard questions: Where are you God? Why so disturbed and downcast? Why have you forgotten me? That’s the hard edge of mystery—less a delight at so much more that I can’t fully take in and more so a raising of a confused fist against all that doesn’t make sense or doesn’t fit.
Encountering mystery feels akin to fear. Awe always has a proper hint of fright in it. When I hike in the mountains, I’m left speechless by the magnificent beauty, yet also silenced by the realization that there are a hundred ways I could die in this territory. After Jesus calms the wind and the waves, Peter cowers in awe-filled terror before Jesus. This man is too much, meek and wild. Isn’t that what the villagers of the Gadarenes (Matthew 8) felt when they met Jesus, the demon-hurler? Before them sat the region’s most notorious and violent spectres, now clothed and in their right minds. Nothing in their frame of reference could account for this new reality. And their response? “They pleaded with Jesus to leave their region.” (Matt. 8:34)
They begged Jesus to get out of town because health and wholeness scared the daylights out of them. We are so used to death that health terrifies us; we are so accustomed to shadows and despair that when hope and light show up, we hardly know what to do with them, let alone having the ability to recognize it.
More often than not, the instinctive response is to settle for lesser gods that we can manage because the Living God is utterly undomesticated and very much beyond our control. The fearful mystery in the arrival of Jesus is the coming of the Sovereign of nations, the firstborn over all creation, the Alpha and Omega, the resurrection and the life, the rival to every throne, including the throne of your life, the one who claims us so completely that nothing is off limits.
A tidy, safe god evokes no awe. Canadian author, teacher, and pastor Mark Buchanan writes, “The safe god asks nothing of us, gives nothing to us. He never drives us to our knees in hungry, desperate praying and never sets us on our feet in fierce, fixed determination … a safe god inspires neither awe, nor worship, nor sacrifice … the safe god is actually your worst enemy.”
In C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Pevensie children begin to hear of Aslan, the King of Narnia, who is a lion. Lucy wonders, “Is he—quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”
“That you will, dearie, and no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver; “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or just silly.”
“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.
“Safe?” Said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
The reverse scenario happens every Christmas. We’re not nervous, but a bit lulled by the image of a little baby—what could be more harmless than that? Yet the mystery in the manger is that the hand of power that rules all things is curled around a mother’s finger.
The season of Advent has been the church’s time to “prepare the way for the Lord.” It reminds us that this newborn baby is anything but safe and teaches us how to enter the fearful mystery of Christmas. Part of that preparatory work is to scrub away the froth and clichés of Christmas. Advent is a season of repentance, and one of the more important things I need to repent of are all my safe gods, the well-curated pantheon of lesser deities that are my worst enemies. Only then am I ready to be embraced by the One who holds all the hopes and fears of all the years.
I want to be there for the wonder of unbearable light, to behold the mystery of Immanuel. Along with wild-eyed John the Baptist, poet Denise Levertov puts me in the right Advent posture of unflinching realism and wild hope:
On the mystery of the Incarnation
It’s when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart:
not to a flower, not to a dolphin,
to no innocent form
but to this creature vainly sure
it and no other is god-like, God
(out of compassion for our ugly
failure to evolve) entrusts,
as guest, as brother,
The Word.
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