Christmas Eve is a night of expectancy. The world waits for the key to turn, and for salvation to flood in from the other side of the door. Within Christmas Eve there is contained a long history, that encompasses the entirety of natural and human experience. God could not be incarnated until several things took place. Everything had to fall, like tumblers on a lock, preparing the way for God to enter into history.
Of course there is the long evolutionary march to humanity itself. Billions of years of beauty and majesty as the universe increased in complexity and in the direction of life and consciousness. Until matter got it's act together, and beauty and complexity led to life and mind, none of this would be possible.
But humanity as a biological phenomenon is not yet ready for God's presence. It could have been, it had the potential to be, but was not. Was Adam a first experiment, an initial try at such a preparation? Or was the full awareness of a truly human consciousness just the first in a line of dominoes? Either way, it became necessary for a long cultural march. Man had to become aware of the spiritual, of the divine, and then had to try to organize its thoughts around that encounter. Moral and spiritual awareness were both necessary if the true nature of the Divine was to enter into history at a particular point.
And then had to come the 'discovery' that it was in the moral side that the most important aspect of the divine was to be known. A people had to organize around the idea that goodness was itself divine. Once such a discovery was made, God could truly begin the process of divine revelation. The Oneness of God took root in many cultures. The personality of this One God was retained in only one. The Jews knew that God was found in the ethical, and therefore God was One. Yet they never gave up the idea (on any significant scale anyways), that within our own experience of personhood and the human condition, there was also something of the divine. God was not some From of the Good, lacking the vitality of human existence. Vitality was seen as but a particular outgrowth of that Goodness-That-Is-God. God was a God of goodness, yes, but also of life. Virtue and verve were seen as one.
Yet these experiences and reflections are rife with tensions and contradictions, tensions and contradictions that themselves had to be encountered, and recorded, if any more progress was to be made. The Problem of Evil, and the Problem of Mercy and Justice, caused a note or shadow of despair to raise up in the Hebraic mind. It had to be so, for without this the reality of sin could never be fully realized. Our true predicament had to be recognized, if the purpose of God was to be identified, and our salvation wrought as it must be.
While these contradictions reigned, worship of politics became the order of the day. The devil had to make his move. No doubt, he saw this as a pre-emptive strike against his creator, but in truth this had to take place if God was to make His Ultimate Appearance. What must have looked to the enemy like an ingenious first move, was in fact playing right into the hands of the One Who Saves.
Meanwhile, awareness that no easy intellectual answer would solve the tensions resulting from encounter with God had caused God's people to look to the day when the answer would take a concrete form. Expectations of a coming messiah, which mirror similar hopes and dreams in religions and cultures across the world, stem from an awareness that whatever solutions were to come to the problems of suffering and sin, they had to be concrete and within history. No mystical escapism was sought, nor would it have ever satisfied the human need for the divine presence. The messiah would be someone who would bring justice and make the world right, instituting the ways of God which seem so hidden to those here below. That these hopes were overly simplistic and in some ways mirrored the activities of saviors-who-were-not-saviors found in Rome and elsewhere is hardly surprising. That the devil mimicked and distorted a justified hope even less so.
What is important is the hope itself not (for the Jewish people) that God would come as a man, but that through a man God's rule would be instituted here on Earth. Yes, messianic expectations had to develop, before the messiah could come. And the idea of the Suffering Servant, unique as far as I know in all of religious scripture, this too was necessary. There could have been no Jesus Christ if there had been no Isaiah the Prophet to lay down the vision that was in many ways a stage of the Incarnation itself.
That night, that night before Jesus was born, all these hopes, and dreams, and histories were contained in the womb of a young woman, in a backwater town, in a backwater kingdom. She could not know it then (who could?), but I have little doubt she felt the magnitude of what was going on. How could she not? Visions of angels and choirs of heaven for all who were near are entirely believable. But no one then could fully realize the magnitude of what was about to happen: the culmination of 15 Billion years of divine activity, in a single moment, in a single person. God was about to enter history. And nothing would ever be the same.
May that key that was turned all those years ago, be turned for you tonight. May you realize the true meaning of Jesus Christ and His coming, not as some particular religious sentiment but as the concrete fulfillment of the ideas, revelations, and struggles of one particular people, and at the same time all people...struggles through which God had been slowly revealing Himself for quite a long time. Jesus is God as man. Not as magical man, or supernatural man, or mythical man, but as an ordinary, common human being. In Him is God revealed and God present. If this becomes true for you tonight, then as it did for the world, everything can change for you as well. Amen.
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