Advent Thoughts, #21
The virtues of Christmas: Love.
Not romantic, not sappy, not even filial. Self-sacrificing. I am not even sure we can talk about God's love as self-sacrificing; God is too big, too other to have a self (which we could get into a big debate as to whether the self really exists anyway, or if it's just a Western invention. A colleague from China says they have no expression for "I don't feel comfortable with that," a very telling insight).
God sacrificed . . . what? In a sense nothing, because He did not lose His being, His glory, His nature, His kingdom--but not permanently. For a while He did. And He submitted to the will of mankind for a while, which was of course evil, the kind of evil we saw Friday and still find unspeakable. (We saw attempts at self-sacrificing love also, by teachers who tried to shield their charges, and by police who dutifully, but more than dutifully, went into the crime scene and had to view bullet-ridden children's bodies.) God always knew He would return to power, but the Bible makes it clear that the experience of the incarnation in some way altered the cosmos, that God "learned obedience". . . an unfathomable thought, but one that assures us He is fully sympathetic with human existence. God cannot learn and yet He did, in a way.
The Love of Christmas is empathetic love, something no other religion offers.
Not romantic, not sappy, not even filial. Self-sacrificing. I am not even sure we can talk about God's love as self-sacrificing; God is too big, too other to have a self (which we could get into a big debate as to whether the self really exists anyway, or if it's just a Western invention. A colleague from China says they have no expression for "I don't feel comfortable with that," a very telling insight).
God sacrificed . . . what? In a sense nothing, because He did not lose His being, His glory, His nature, His kingdom--but not permanently. For a while He did. And He submitted to the will of mankind for a while, which was of course evil, the kind of evil we saw Friday and still find unspeakable. (We saw attempts at self-sacrificing love also, by teachers who tried to shield their charges, and by police who dutifully, but more than dutifully, went into the crime scene and had to view bullet-ridden children's bodies.) God always knew He would return to power, but the Bible makes it clear that the experience of the incarnation in some way altered the cosmos, that God "learned obedience". . . an unfathomable thought, but one that assures us He is fully sympathetic with human existence. God cannot learn and yet He did, in a way.
The Love of Christmas is empathetic love, something no other religion offers.
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