Advent Reflection: saying yes to God

When we read through the Christmas story, what is striking throughout the narrative, pulled together from the gospel accounts of Luke and Matthew, is the constant theme of men and women chosen to play an integral part in the story, saying yes to God, affirming their trust in him.

Elizabeth and Zechariah contradict their relatives and defy tradition to follow divine instructions and name their baby John, instead of naming him after his father. Meanwhile Mary, though a virgin, refuses to disbelieve the claim that she is to conceive and instead asks how it shall be, whilst Joseph responds to God’s instructions to take Mary to be his wife, abandoning his plan to quietly separate from her to avoid bringing scandal upon her.

Shepherds abandon their flocks to see the saviour they are told about by a heavenly angelic host, whilst foreigners from the East follow a star, trusting that they will indeed find the Jewish king, and still accepting his kingship and emptying their treasures before him despite the lowly circumstances of the boy and his young parents, which should surely have made anyone question if this was really a king at all or one big mistake.

And finally Simeon, prompted by the Holy Spirit, goes to the temple in Jerusalem and recognises Israel’s saviour in the tiny infant, who he has so longed to see before his death.

Again and again, God intervenes in extraordinary ways, making extraordinary demands and giving extraordinary revelations, and is met with a yes by those he has chosen. Would you abandon your livelihood if you thought you’d received a revelation from a choir of angels in the dark hours of the night? Would you travel miles trusting a humble star? Would you respond to the prompting of God to be in a certain place, to witness something incomprehensibly magnificent?

 

Familiarity does present a real danger. The Christmas story is so well-known, so often retold and so frequently lavished with sentimentality that we can skip over the details. We can get rushed along with the flow of the gospel accounts, not pausing to think about what’s really going on, placing ourselves in the same scenes and asking ourselves how God is speaking to us in these stories.

In Advent, we anticipate Christ’s coming – the remembrance of his coming to Earth, and his coming in the future, whether at the end of time or the moment of our own death.

The opening to John’s gospel (1:1-2) tells us that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.”

That which john calls the logos (the word) is Jesus Christ. Jesus’s birth, celebrated at Christmas, is God speaking into human history. This is what we’re gearing up to remember. We’re reminded that God speaks into our future too, as we’re invited to consider our readiness for his second coming.

We forget, though, that God is speaking into the present as well. Perhaps the Advent vocabulary of waiting, coming, appearing and revealing, takes us away from the present moment and draws us into anticipation or remembrance. But the mystery of the incarnation is very much a mystery for the here and now, and Advent should remind us afresh that the word is eternal, and the word is crying out to us. Will we listen?

Our highest calling as Christians is to accept God’s invitation to relationship with him. Invitation is exactly what it is. In these stories, God reveals himself in different ways to the various characters, presenting each with a choice. Mary chooses to affirm her trust in the angel; the shepherds and wise men choose to journey to Bethlehem; Simeon chooses to respond to the spirit’s prompt to go to the temple.

God, however, does not always intervene quite so dramatically. We also have the scriptures, prayer, the church and the sacraments as the normal language through which we encounter the divine, seeking to wrestle what we want with what God wants for us. All this is, too frequently, sneered at in a rationalist era. Talk of revelations, of encounter and relationship with a god, of the mystical and mysterious, can provoke hostility at worst, and at best awkward embarrassment.

Yet if the Christmas story is to have any meaning in our lives, it must draw us afresh into that invitation to fellowship with God. It must present us, once more, with an opportunity to remind ourselves that we are made in God’s image. We must ask ourselves if our god is an abstract notion – a distant cosmic intelligence or a vague hope we call out to when we’re entirely out of steam and any other ideas, or one who craves our participation in divine love so much that he revealed himself as a person so that we could know him. Do we really believe that? Do we really trust him?

The Christian story is quite unlike any other. When you read the gospels, you see clearly that the authors take great care to locate the events described into a time and place in history. These are no legends. Christianity describes historical reality. It’s utterly baked into history. God has truly spoken into human history, using people of great and profound faith along the way to do so. Are they characters in a story we remember with mere whimsicality and comforting fondness, or is their example of dying to self and living out God’s purpose for their lives a beacon of faith for us? That’s the hard, confronting yet crucial question we must ask ourselves.