(The Nationalist, 22 December 2006)
God created a marvellous universe, the wonders of which astronomy has only begun to reveal to us. Have you ever looked at the sky on a clear night, and simply stood there in silent wonder? Its immensity is beyond our imagination, and its physics breaks through our closed certainties.
God created a beautiful Earth. TV programmes help to bring this home to us, amazing us with nature’s variety and beauty. We see the inter-connectedness of things, how everything is related to everything else, with nothing existing in isolation. All of this could be said to be natural to God. God is creator. To love is to give, to be creative.
But an Earth without people would be as lonely as a house without people, that is to say, just a building, not a home. So God created people, and did so in a way that reflects God’s image:
- every baby has a head, heart, and hands;
- every baby has intelligence, free will, imagination, and emotions;
- every baby has an inbuilt desire for justice, truth, love, respect, and freedom, even though they will never be fully reached.
But we humans are great messers. We misuse God’s gifts; we only have to look at the mess we have made of much of planet Earth, our home, to see that. And failure is among the commonest of all human experiences.
When God saw our mess, he could, so to speak, have held his nose, looked the other way, and said, ‘I’ll leave them to their sordid and sorry little mess. It’s their own fault, they brought it on themselves. Why should I bother?’ But that is not God’s way.
God came to our help:
- through the prophets, but they were either ignored or killed;
- through the Ten Commandments. They are not a moral obstacle course, but more like a fence at the edge of the cliff, a map and compass in a wilderness. Keeping them makes for good relationships, good conscience, good health of mind and body. They save us from ourselves. But often we refuse them also.
So God asks: ‘What should I do now?’
Abandon them? No. That is not God’s way.
Set aside free will, impose a solution on them, clean up their mess? No. We could then say, ‘It’s easy for God to do that, but it leaves us unchanged’.
Send more prophets? They’ll probably kill them like they did the others.
Enter into the world myself – that’s the way forward.
How should God enter the world? As a person, because that is the way to become present to people. So God enters humanity as a human being, beginning, like the rest of us, as a child. God comes not in power, but in powerlessness. There is no one as helpless as a baby. God entered our human situation with its failings, becoming like us in all things, including temptation, but not in sin.
Among other things, this could change our view of God, away from a remote and impersonal being to someone who is among us, even within us. And the celebration of Christmas is not only the recollection of a past event, but a recognition of the presence of God among us in the here and now, including our failures.
A feature of the Christmas Gospel story is its silence. Hardly anyone speaks. In opening up to God, that helps.
For those in a hurry: ‘God became man that man might become God’. (Saint Athanasius)