God never does things the way we expect.
This does not mean that God is erratic, unstable, or doesn’t have a consistent character. Scripture is very clear that He is “unchanging,” in the sense that He is always Himself. He has patterns to His actions with human beings.
And one of those patterns is never playing by our rules.
Humans come up with the most elaborate bureaucracies and intricate, complicated societies. We all know how things are “supposed” to work. Obviously, we need order and structure in society, or everything breaks down. But when keeping the status quo interrupts the greater concerns of mercy, justice, charity, etc., that is when God takes pleasure in messing up our expectations.
You see it all the time in the Gospels. Jesus does something that technically breaks “The Law” (usually a human add-on that complicated a more straightforward command of God). The religious leaders are annoyed. Jesus shows why what He is doing is more in keeping with the desires of God’s heart. The religious leaders are humiliated; the disciples learn a lesson. Rinse, repeat.
To a not-so-secretly rebellious soul like myself, these stories appealed to me as a child (and now). Tradition is great; but people are always more important.
Christmas celebrates the official opening of God’s Ultimate Plan. The plan that would rescue humanity from its own worst enemy: ourselves. The plan that would end with sin forever beaten.
And it began with…a baby.
We know the story, so it feels natural. But for the world Jesus was born into, it was anything but. The Jews suffered under the oppression of the Roman Empire. The last recorded prophet had been 400 years prior. The religious elite cared more about their own power, wealth, and safety than providing spiritual guidance. People were waiting for a Savior. They expected a king. Someone brave and strong and charismatic, like David of old.
Instead, they got a baby, born to a teenage girl from a nothing village. Galilee was the equivalent of Hickstown. Mary was no one important in their eyes.
God became weak to make us strong.
I was inspired to make this post after my Advent reading today. I honestly can’t improve on Bonhoeffer’s words, so I’m just going to share it verbatim (bolded emphasis is mine):
“God travels in wonderful ways with human beings, but He does not comply with the views and opinions of people. God does not go the way that people want to prescribe for Him; rather His way is beyond all comprehension, free and self-determined beyond all proof.
Where reason is indignant, where our nature rebels, where our piety anxiously keeps us away, that is precisely where God loves to be. There He confounds the reason of the reasonable; there He aggravates our nature, our piety—that is where He wants to be, and no one can keep Him from it. Only the humble believe Him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that He does wonders where people despair, that He takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous. And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings, God marches right in, He chooses people as His instruments and performs His wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; He loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.
That is the unrecognized mystery of the world: Jesus Christ. That this Jesus of Nazareth, the carpenter, was himself the Lord of glory: that was the mystery of God. It was a mystery because God became poor, low, lowly, and weak out of love for humankind, because God became a human being like us, so that we would become divine, and because He came to us so that we would come to Him. God as the one who becomes low for our sakes, God in Jesus of Nazareth—that is the secret hidden wisdom that “no eye has seen nor ear heard nor the human heart conceived” (11 Cor. 2:9)….That is the depth of the Deity whom we worship as mystery and comprehend as mystery.”
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When I was kid in Sunday School, we sang a song (whose name I’ve long forgotten) that said, “He’s the king of a kingdom upside-down, if you wanna go up, then you have to go down…”
The Bible is full of this paradox. Loose your life to save it. Become weak and be made strong. Win by sacrificing everything.
Become king by being born as a baby, to die. This is the mystery: that God does everything the opposite of how we think He should, and it works!
In our lives, it is often less glamorous. Become more patient by teaching children that call out your name hundreds of times in class, to ask about something you just went over. Learn grace by reprimanding the same behaviors over and over. Practice excellence by making sure you put away all your students’ ipads at the end of the day. Give up control and have peace.
It is Christmas: the time to be reminded that Christians belong to an upside-down kingdom of mystery, and serve a King who will always work everything out…according to His plan, not ours.
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Virginia Beach (and close enough) friends, I will be home for Christmas on December 19th! I come with presents and will need all the blankets and cocoa you can find. (I live in a land where 82 degrees is considered “cool”.) See you soon!
Teach; Think; Write. 