From a favorite writer, Jill Carattini, 12/10/2014
Salvation or Sentimentality?
“Who has understood the mind of the LORD?”(Isaiah 40:13) This God who moves among people, touching all of life and history is certainly not the quiet and tame being we often imagine. God’s ways are not our ways. God’s stories are not the kind of stories we would write if the telling were up to us. God’s thoughts are the kind of thoughts that expose deception and shine in darkness, that shatter hearts and rewrite stories.
It is the same with the child born in a stable two thousand years ago. The infant the world remembers lying peacefully in a manger with cattle lowing nearby did not take long to fulfill the words spoken to his young parents: “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.”(Luke 2:34-35) Definitely not the sort of thing a stranger typically says to a young mother holding a baby. Is this the child we are anticipating this Advent?
British author Dorothy Sayers once lamented the manner in which Jesus is often remembered: he is the quiet sage full of wisdom, the safe and peaceful one of history. He is, for all practical purposes, somewhat dull, someone we might be interested in at a later time. Yet Sayers writes:
“The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore—on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him ‘meek and mild,’ and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.”
The Christian season of Advent is a time of anticipation not for the harmless baby surrounded by lights and presents, but for the dynamic savior who is born into our midst in a way that must forever change us. “Do you want to be delivered?” asked Dietrich Bonhoeffer in an Advent sermon more than 70 years ago. “That is the only really important and decisive question which Advent poses for us. Does there burn within us some lingering longing to know what deliverance really means? If not, what would Advent then mean to us? A bit of sentimentality. A little lifting of the spirit within us? A little kinder mood? But if there is something in this word Advent which we have not yet known, that strangely warms our heart; if we suspect that it could, once more, once more, mean a turning point in our life, a turning to God, to Christ—why then are we not simply obedient, listening and hearing in our ears the clear call: Your deliverance draws nigh!”
In this season of Advent we hear a strange and drastic story. The church anticipates nothing less than the Lion of Judah wrapped in swaddling clothes; the coming of a human rescuer unhindered. Mystery itself, mercifully, draws nigh.
-Jill Carattini