Advent Reflection #9: The What of Advent - Love
I hesitated to include that as a
theme of Christmas and the preparation for it.
I have watched too many Hallmark Movies whose outcomes I could figure
out in ten minutes. (Hallmark used to
make once-a-year, really good dramatic shows that bore repeated watchings. Now they are Lifetime with a little less sex.)
Hallmark, and other movies (see Love
Actually, While You Were Sleeping, et al) put love in the context of Christmas
so that lovers can walk in the snow, kiss under mistletoe, deal with crazy families,
give a special gift, etc. It’s all quite
sweet. Nary a manger in sight, of
course. We don’t want to confuse
romantic love and easy premarital sex with the existence of God incarnate, do
we?
Oh, I’m getting snarky. I always do when I think about the media’s
effects on civilization. Or when I hear
“the miracle of Christmas,” “the magic of Christmas,” blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, enough of that. Love of the real, honest, deep,
life-transforming sort is the message of Christmas. A woman loves God enough to be a social
outcast with her pregnancy. A man loves
his fiancée enough not to divorce her.
God loves us enough to become one of us.
We think being human is something special, so it must be a pretty cool
experience for God to become a human. Uh,
how about no. The “human” God became
(and I realize I am not using sufficiently theologically correct language here,
but let’s go with it) was not born into comfortable 21st century
America. He was born into the equivalent
of Haiti, by our standards of comparison. His ethnic counterparts were
oppressed, and his family was poor, and he knew that he would die young on a
cross, isolated. It was our life but it
was not. However, “he learned obedience
through the things which he suffered,” as Hebrews says. I don’t think this
means he learned to be obedient, but he learned what obedience meant to humans
in a body of flesh. He understands what
the martyrs in North Korea are going through.
That mission was motivated by an
inextricable combination of love and justice.
Justice is a theme more appropriate to Easter, perhaps, but Love fits
into Christmas. For God so loved the
world that he became a fetus and a baby (again, theologically imprecise. Sorry)
Do we love anyone enough to become an insect to save them?
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