A Thought For Advent

In his sermon this morning, Pastor Brady suggested that there is something very special about God becoming a baby, not only that in becoming a baby the Almighty has become the least powerless of us all, as is often noted, but also that the presence of a baby has a way of bringing people together regardless of other circumstances. I find something excellently charming about this second proposition, for I think it is ratified even by the experience of those of us who are less than thrilled by children. It is a peculiar sort of misanthrope who does not brighten a bit at a calm baby, and feels no compassion for the mother cloud his irritation at the presence of a wailing one. In the case of babies only do people almost universally warm to a stranger, whether at home, in a restaurant, on the street. A baby of any people can indeed be ‘a great joy to all peoples.’ (Luke 2:10) Some might say that this is circumstance of our particular culture—as though that somehow undid the significance of the fact that our Lord was a baby, as though he was not born for us too—; some might say that it is merely a predisposition necessary for the survival of the race, again as though that mitigated things, as though the significance of the Incarnation, which is God-With-Us, can be understood only insofar as we extract it from all its human contexts of history and matter, that is, as God not with us. When God chose to make things clear to us by becoming flesh, does it seem as though He would then demand we understand Him in that state in terms other than our own, when it was His aim to greet us on our own terms, in the flesh?

There is also an interesting way in which our behavior towards babies provides space in the Incarnation for some divine irony. For it is only said that we ‘fawn over’ babies for need of a sillier term; the action is adoration. We adore them and make them an object of our hope and love. How beautiful is it then that out of this little idolatry, this common sin of ours, God has worked actual worship? How beautiful that out of unconscious evil good was brought forth? Make then this occasion for sin a reminder of the good worship we all should aim at, and of the incredible ingenuity of God’s good working.