Reimagining Christmas

Between Advents

Christmas is, of course, the time in which we retell and remember the story of the God that would enter human history. Yes, I am aware many things can and have been said about this, but I am going to try something "newish" anyway. While there are many motifs in the birth narratives drawing God’s story together, there are two themes which I am deeming somewhat central and unnoticed that I want to consider: 

   

1.                    First is the exilic Israel who was awaiting deliverance with some amount of anticipation.  Though they were in fact back in their land at this point, Israel was hardly a free people.  They were not being led by their God or even their own leaders, but were ruled by a Hellenizing Rome.  Richard Bauckham points out that God’s liberation of Israel, as depicted in Luke (1:68-73, 78-79), is seen as only being made possible by the Davidic Messiah.  This savior would free Israel from all Gentile oppressors so that they could be free to serve their God rather than their enemies.[1]   Perhaps many faithful Jews, who had ultimately become a marginalized people, had come to see that their own strength and vitality was an illusion and it could only be remedied by the God they must wait for.  What few expected or remembered, since I am pretty sure the notion was that God was coming to slaughter Israel’s oppressors, was that God was actually coming to reclaim Kingship over Israel as-well-as over Caesar and the rest of the world(Isa. 42:5-9; Ps. 86:9-10). All peoples were invited to wait and make themselves ready by understanding God’s ways and making those ways their own (Isa. 2:3).

2.                        Second is the God who had always planned on doing a new thing by integrating himself into the human existence as-well-as us into him. This is to say that God’s coming was not some backup-plan nor was it originally a rescue mission due to our sin, though that certainly became part of it.  God’s incarnation was about a creation that would be so fully homogenized with its God that their relational existence would only reach its fullness in him; a radical endosymbiosis if you will (Jn. 17:20-26; Eph. 1:3-6). Then, whatever is true about God (love, wholeness, faithfulness, gentleness, kindness, peace etc…) at its telos (not in the sense of finality, but the pinnacle the world is moving toward) cannot help but be true about the humanity existing in him.  Until then, we live in anticipatory waiting between advents. 

               

It Is In the Waiting

What we do in the in-between time is crucial. Advent and waiting was an endemic theme in scripture for those who remained committed to following God.  After the Exodus from Egypt we briefly see a people who wait on God.  Moses refuses to go anywhere unless God was going also (Ex. 33:13-16).  This posturing brought freedom; freedom that allowed God to be God as-well-as a freedom of personhood that could no longer be dominated, managed or co-opted by any to be “Pharaohs”.      

          

So also, the prophet Isaiah (as the reminder of Exodus) contrasts us in our waiting and in our going ahead.  When one takes the initiative (in some prideful sense) into their own hands they experience a fatigue that comes from the fight against, or settling for, dominating regimes. But, the contrary comes in our waiting where strength is renewed and weariness dissipates (40:28-31).  To borrow from Brueggemann, waiting is the stance that shows our place is “in receiving and not grasping, in inheriting and not possessing, in praising and not seizing.”[2]  The initiative is no longer ours, though our inclinations are apt to protect and control, but the posture of recipient reveals we have nothing to offer; waiting in our vulnerability is how we make room for God. 

If I can end with this:

To wait open-endedly is an enormously radical attitude toward life. So is to trust that something will happen to us that is far beyond our imaginings. So, too, is giving up control over our future and letting God define our life, trusting that God molds us according to God's love and not according to our fear. The spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, trusting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination, fantasy, or prediction. That, indeed, is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control.[3]

However, it is in this stance that we are drawn to wait in anticipatory readiness for the “baby in the manger”, which translates into the readiness and anticipation of waiting for that Messiah’s return.  Today is the eve of Christmas which is often fully charged with its own anticipation and our attempt to stand ready of whatever one is to celebrate, but if we have not come to know this anticipatory readiness for our God, then I fear we have missed the point of the Kingship he resumed and is bringing into fullness for our sake… Merry Christmas!

[1] Richard Bauckham. The Jewish World Around the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic Publishing 2008), 337.

[2] Walter Brueggemann. The Prophetic Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press 2001), 78.

[3] This came from the lecture A Spirituality of Waiting given by Henri Nouwen in 1985.