The Hidden Power of God at Christmas

Christmas is about the humility of God coming into human flesh, entering the world born in a stable. This is lowly and rustic and familiar, but lest we think God reducing Himself to our span is a lowering of standards, a making of Himself comfortable with the way things simply are with us and our world, we need to be reminded that this is a paradox, a mystery of mysteries. The Incarnation is humility, but it is a great and glorious humility because here is also the presence full-strength of the Power and Majesty and Holiness who framed the worlds in glory and perfection, who rules on high and commands the innumerable angelic host, who demands justice and righteousness from His creatures and will judge them accordingly, who is infinite and incomparable in every way. Indeed, the Incarnation does not gainsay God's almighty power but rather underscores it and shows that it is of one substance with His love and compassion, which He extends even and especially to this race that has fallen from Him and brought the whole Creation into ruin. This is a God beyond all limits. This is a God who is big enough to become small for the sake of love.

The fullness of this Deity came to dwell bodily in the Child Jesus. This means that though this Child was small, though He was born in the meanest of circumstances, poor, of a people oppressed, He was able to faithfully carry out the plan for which His Father had placed His hand to the plow, and He did it not in spite of this smallness but precisely through it. Of Him, St. Paul hymns:

6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, 7 but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death— even death on a cross! 9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:6-11)

And, of course, Jesus through His death and resurrection has raised fallen humanity so that those who believe in Him may sit with Him in the glory mentioned above both now in the Church and forever in the New Jerusalem. Great is the promise of Christmas. Christ and we His brothers and sisters are the firstfruits of the New Creation, with which all of heaven and nature are destined to be crowned.

The Office of Readings on Christmas Day bears beautiful witness to the glory the Kingdom that has arrived in the humble birth of Christ will bring to the whole Creation. But while I was feasting on these wonderful readings this Christmas, I was also mourning the deaths of the worshipers in Nigeria who had been killed earlier that morning in church bombings as they were glorying in the same Christmas mystery. It is confusing, senseless, and tragic that on the morning when they were celebrating peace on earth that at least two dozen of Christ's redeemed should die in such wanton acts of hatred and violence. The promise of Christmas is not yet fully realized. It is perhaps in recognition of such realities that many parts of the Church commemorate the Feast of St. Stephen the Martyr the day after Christmas and the Feast of the Martyrdom of the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem on December 28. It is one thing that during the Christmas season violence should come upon the Church unexpectedly, but in light of all that the Incarnation means for humanity and the world, why do we intentionally turn our gaze back to the predations the enemy has made against God, His Christ, and His redeemed children as we do in these commemorations?

Well, until God's Kingdom arrives in all its fullness at Christ's Second Coming, His reign will often be manifested among us in a hidden manner, as it was in the First Coming. God came to us in the fullness of His glory, hidden in the weakness of the Child born in Bethlehem. We remember the martyrs in the midst of the Christmas celebration because in their deaths they bear witness to this Child, who grew up to become the servant of all, pouring out His blood and giving His life for a world determined to reject Him. Resurrection, glory, and the New Creation came through the cross. He descended into the earth that he might rise to the heights of heaven and fill the whole universe, and He made himself the bondsman of His enemies, receiving death at their hands, that he might be the captain of their salvation. This is how Christ has triumphed, won brothers and sisters for himself from among His enemies, and how He is transforming the world that yet lies in wickedness.

In like manner, as the martyrs echo the sufferings of the Lord who bought them, laying hold of Him who unto the death laid hold of them, they plant their blood as the seed of the Church. People see the power that is in their testimony to the Lord Jesus and come to recognize something they cannot account for in the unbreakable hope these have in Him. This is Christ at work, hiding His glory in the suffering of the saints, overcoming His enemies and theirs, converting foes of the Gospel to children of God, and all of it through the death He shares with His martyrs.

In a less dramatic though still paradoxical manner, this is also the way it is with all Christians in the lesser martyrdoms we experience in our lives. Life in a fallen world is filled with small vexations that build up and gradually steal away our strength. Life doesn't quite go the way we plan, and we don't seem as victorious as we think we ought to be. Our jobs are unsatisfying, or we fail in our relationships. We spin our wheels. We seem to accomplish little of lasting worth. Whether they be these kinds of trials or the catastrophies that leave our lives in utter ruin, Jesus Christ is with us, hidden in our hearts with power and grace for us and for our world. What we shall be in Him we do not yet see, but the fullness of God hidden in the helpless Child and the unveiling of the glory residing there that came through His humble obedience to the Father bear the ultimate witness to what is ours even now and what shall be fully realized in us and in our world from our communion with Him. Keep the faith, humble Christian; Christ hidden in us is the power that overcomes the world.

Our Suffering Savior

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
³He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

⁴Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.
⁵But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

Isaiah 53:2-5

⁹But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.

¹⁰In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering. ¹¹Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers.

¹⁷For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. ¹⁸Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

Hebrews 2:9-11, 17-18

Suffering is the most universal of human experiences. We cannot escape it no matter who we are or where we’re from. It will always catch up with us one way or another. Suffering is simply an unavoidable aspect of life. Some endure more suffering in a lifetime; others endure less. Some live in wealth; others live in poverty. Some live in health; others live constantly in the grip of illness. Some are despised and persecuted; others live in the good graces of seemingly everyone. But regardless of whether we live most of our lives in an overwhelming flood of trials and tribulations or in their relative absence, we all know pain. We have all known what it is to have a broken heart at one point or another; we have all known what it is to be hurt by friends, family, lovers, coworkers, and strangers; we have all known what it is like to be sick and to endure the illnesses of loved ones; we have all known privation at one time or another; we have all known the ravages of nature; we have all known the tragedies of death that befall our loved ones, and ultimately, we will all experience death for ourselves.

The question of why we suffer has been the most thoroughly considered of all questions theologians have wrestled with throughout the centuries. If God is all powerful, if God is good, why does he allow us to suffer as horribly as we do? In my humble opinion, Christianity does not provide a better answer for why we suffer than any of the world's other great religions. What it does provide, however, in comparison with them is the truth that our God is not removed from or indifferent to the sufferings of his creatures. Christianity asserts a God who exists in solidarity with his creatures in the face of their sufferings. The lessons of the cross are great and could be pondered for all of eternity, but, one of the greatest lessons we can learn from the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ is that we are not alone in our sufferings.

I have come to embrace a particular teaching on the nature of Christ's sufferings that powerfully conveys the reality of our Savior's solidarity with us in our sufferings. We rightly emphasize that Jesus’ Passion accomplished the satisfaction of Divine Justice's wrath against sin, but we cannot come away from the cross without also realizing that in those horrible hours hanging on the tree, Jesus willingly took up the experience of all the horrors of sin, suffering, and death that each and every human being has ever and will ever know. Not only did our Savior take the penalty for our sin upon himself but he also took on all the sufferings resulting from the presence of sin and evil in the world as his own personal experience. Whenever we endure suffering or see its presence, we have known the very experience of Jesus Christ.

We cannot, however, simply consider suffering an experience that Christ endured once in the distant past on Calvary. We can be sure that whenever we hurt, Christ is present to us right now at this very moment suffering right along with us. For the Christian, then, we do not suffer in vain, for Christ has sanctified suffering and redeemed it forever. Therefore, just as Christ suffered and was glorified as a result, if we suffer for him and alongside of him, we will surely share in his glory.

Filling the Universe with the Fullness of God

Ephesians 3:17-19
And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 4:8-10
“When he ascended on high,
he led captives in his train
and gave gifts to men.”

What does “he ascended” mean except that he also descended to the lower, earthly regions? He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe

Our life in this world is a constant search for wholeness, for fullness. For those of us who have been grasped by the love of God in Christ, we have found wholeness; we have found all the fullness. He is truly all we need. Christ alone is the fullness of God, and He has come in human flesh. Because of God’s coming into human flesh, when we are united to Christ through the Holy Spirit, this fullness comes closer to us than to our own hearts.

Why then are we believers so often cast down? The simple answer is that we have allowed Satan to take from us the awareness of just how full and wonderful this fullness is. We have allowed him to steal our joy and purpose because we have drawn the loop too tightly on what this salvation God has given us consists of. We have lost the full-orbed Christian hope. Let me explain what I mean. I believe we have robbed God of His good world and failed to see that “heaven and earth are filled with His glory.” Over the last 1000 years the Christian Church has increasingly bought into a dualism that strictly opposes nature to grace, heaven to earth, and matter to spirit. What may come as a great surprise to most is that the Bible simply does not teach this. The faith of Israel embodied in the Old Testament and the faith of the Church embodied in the New Testament teaches us that not only did God establish a good and perfect universe once in the distant past but that He has continuously from the foundation of the world upheld, governed, ruled, and manifested Himself in every inch of the universe. In spite of the entry of decay, corruption, and death into his creation through the Fall, God is still governing and guiding everything toward the glorious fulfillment of His will. The Good News for us as Christians is that God has fulfilled in our flesh at just the right time in history all his promises for the consummation of the universe. The Word became flesh and dwelt, “tabernacled” among us. In the Incarnation, death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and heavenly rule of His Son Jesus Christ, God has given us in the present time the fulfillment of all His future promises. This is the Gospel. God is recovering all that was lost in the Fall through the person and work of His Son Jesus. This Gospel is as big and broad and wide and long and high and deep as the universe and it expands to cover everything, visible and invisible, that God has made. It is not plan B. God has not abandoned the project He began in the beginning but is renewing it and bringing it to its final glory in His Son. This is what I mean by the full Christian hope. Christ is filling the universe with Himself and all the trappings of His glory.