Immanuel

Our Christmas season was off to a festive start until I got the phone call that evening.  I had driven ahead of my wife to our small place where we first lived as hopelessly romantic newlyweds.  Freshly cut Christmas tree atop my two-door sedan, waiting for her to get home soon so we could put the tree up.  It was our first married Christmas.  We had gone to her grandparents’ house to cut down a tree from their large property. Did I mention we were hopelessly romantic? Oh, and dirt poor at the time so a free tree was great.  But hey, we were rich in love, right!?  

My wife’s voice was shaken and traumatized.  I knew as I heard the first gasp of her shortened breath something was different.  It was raining that night and the passenger side tires of my wife’s car had caught a small puddle on the outside of the fast lane.  She spun around a full three times across four lanes of interstate traffic, just past an overpass guardrail, and was now facing the wrong way into traffic.  Fortunately, she had made it all the way over to the shoulder of the interstate, out of the way of any oncoming cars.  Fortune on top of fortune, there was a police officer who was just behind her and saw her headlights frantically whirling around, who was then able to pull up behind her with lights flashing to help her get turned around and on her way home.  The incredible part of this story, if you haven’t caught it by now, is there was not a scratch on my wife or even her car.  I shudder to think how that night may have turned out different.  Instead of continuing on to raise a Christmas tree that evening in our living room, we could have been raising our prayers to heaven in an ER.  God was with her that night.

Even as I state that God was with her that night I grimace.  Not for her or myself, but for others whose lives are not unscathed by misfortune.  For those who have found themselves with prayerful moans rising in desperate hope to a God who they need to come close and heal their pain.  I know it can be tempting to indulge the thought that we found some divine favor that evening, while others whose lives are in the midst of seething anguish have entered into some kind of divine retribution.  Almost like you are the one walking off the football field with head hung low, having prayed for a win just like the other team, only to have lost to a last second field goal.  The question of evil is the most difficult theological question to answer for a loving God.  I can’t say why our lives only brushed by despair that evening while others get caught by it head on.  I can say it is my belief that there is no situation outside of the reach of God’s redemption.  And I can say even buttressed by that great hope it is still my greatest fear that the tragedy of my life is just around the corner.

It makes me wonder if Job was beleaguered by the same fear because his life was struck by the most dreadful of catastrophes.  He was afflicted to the point of wondering to God, “Do you have eyes of flesh?  Do you see as a mortal sees?”  Beyond these questions in Job 10, I wonder if I can almost hear his thoughts. “God, I know you see my pain, but how come I can’t quite see you?  The peace of your heaven would be such a solace for me.  Is your throne in heaven too far off to relate to my anguish?  Since your holiness is so set apart from me, maybe that is the reason you feel so far removed from the horror of my life now.  Perhaps you are so transcendent you can’t come close to my tragedy?”

The distance between us and God becomes so acute when we suffer and feel afflicted like Job.  Our need for the dwelling presence of God is so desperately felt.  It can seem that a chasm is between us and God; an infinite void of derelict emptiness.  A vacancy we can feel in our hearts when the reality of disaster descends upon us.  An emptiness that makes us wince from the sucker punch of sudden trauma.  We gasp, as if in some desperate way the void might be filled.  God feels so far away.  We feel so alone.  We long for him to remain instead of feeling as if he were removed.  It is more than hunger of a famished spirit and more than thirst of a parched soul.  When our suffocating pain tells us life is crumbling apart, then it is a gut wrenching groan of our entire being just to have God with us.

And then, with a seemingly unsuitable arrival, he was.  God was with us—Immanuel.  “‘She will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel’—which means, ‘God with us.’”  No one could have imagined a more curious arrival for the infant who was born King of kings.  What a peculiar processional of shepherds and barnyard animals to accompany his entrance to the world.  Shouldn’t his birth have been announced to the order of a great chorus with the blast of trumpets demanding the attention of everyone within ear shot?  Instead of being roused with necks craning to the tune of a grand announcement, the residents and travelers of a marginal and logistically unequipped town kept sleeping exhausted from a bustling day among a frantic scurry for its first census.  God was finally with us but without the fanfare, blending in with life as usual in Bethlehem. 

God, you are here. You have moved close to us.  No longer are you removed or far off.  The “compassionate and gracious God” who “passed by” with Moses is now grace and compassion incarnate, immanently dwelling among us once again.  Here in our midst you have come to partake in our pain, to share in our sufferings and to bleed for our brokenness.  As Philip Yancey said in Finding God in Unexpected Places:

In the cold, in the dark, among the wrinkled hills of Bethlehem, God who knows no before or after entered time and space.  He who knows no boundaries at all took them on: the shocking confines of a baby’s skin, the ominous restraints of mortality.  “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation,” an apostle would later say; “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”  But the few eyewitnesses on Christmas night saw none of that.  They saw an infant struggling to work never-before-used lungs.

That night he also took on eyes of flesh to see as we mortals see.  Eyes that would later weep as his heart would move with compassion for those mourning Lazarus, and for Jerusalem as he would try to share with the disciples that the punishment to bring them peace would soon be upon him.  Eyes, which squint into the distance against the last light of day in anticipation that there might be one more wandering child who has turned to come home.  When he came to dwell with us he took on the fullness of our humanity.  He saw life with the same eyes of flesh with which we see.  To be able to see the way we struggle with pain, fear, doubt, despair, stress, and temptation.  He accepted a humble line of sight to see how our hearts sink with heartbreak, how our hope deflates into despair, and how our calm gives way to calamity.  The immortal God adopted the eyes of mortality to see our pain and understand our struggles.

The infant Christ also assumed a heart of flesh, which would warm with compassion toward his creation.  Even as the frost of night invites the warmth of the morning sun so as to be burned away, so the crackling brokenness of our icy hearts compels his compassion toward us.  That he might become our “high priest who is able to sympathize with our weaknesses.”  As Christ stated himself:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
   because he has anointed me
   to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
   and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
   to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” 

To the harassed and helpless his heart moves.  To the sick his healing hand is drawn out.  To the blind his fingers unfurl that they might receive sight.  To those who are hungry his ingenuity sparks as he considers how one boy’s lunch might be multiplied to feed a multitude; as well, to all who hunger spiritually his throat clears and he begins to speak.   To those who were once far off his heart of compassion propels his feet to run with a ready embrace.  Ultimately, to our hearts broken with sin, his hands stretch out to be pierced that we might be made whole.  Our pain was imprinted upon his heart such that he would not direct himself otherwise except to the cross where our peace would be accomplished.  The sight of our frail humanity did not incite his judgment but his compassion instead, that we might be saved through him. 

One of my favorite Christmas songs captures the beauty of Immanuel. 

Fragile finger sent to heal us

Tender brow prepared for thorn

Tiny heart whose blood will save us

Unto us is born

So wrap our injured flesh around you

Breathe our air and walk our sod

Rob our sin and make us holy

Perfect Son of God

Welcome to our world

(Michael W. Smith)

         

Immanuel, you are here.  The infinite and holy God became flesh and dwelt among us.  You are the second Adam here to save us.  Here, to make us new, to make all of creation new.  You were born to live as a suffering servant, as well as a prophet, priest and king.  Here, as the hypostatic union of two complete natures of God and man.  Here, to cleanse my sin and bridge the gap between my utter sinfulness and your utmost holiness.  These are things theology tells me.  My soul, however, delighting as with the richest of fare, simply tells me you are here.  You dwell with my desperate heart.