The Naked God--December 31, 2019

The Naked God--December 31, 2019

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.... And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth." [John 1:1-3a, 14]

I think it's fair to assume that God is not naïve. That just seems like a given.

Similarly, it seems evident from the Scriptures that God knows what God is doing--in other words, that God doesn't just stumble into a situation unprepared or half-cocked and then later regret not thinking things through.  We never get the sense from the storytelling of the Bible that God rushes into a scene, provoked and reckless, without thinking out an endgame strategy.

Just the opposite, in fact: as the scribes, evangelists, and prophets tell it, God is supremely patient, deliberate and thoughtful, and has had from the beginning the consistent goal of restoring and renewing all of creation.  From the beginning, God has been about the business of bringing us to life, whether from the chaos of nothingness, or from the darkness of death.  And even if God's tactics sometimes seem unorthodox (like, say, sending an army around the walls of Jericho with only trumpets, or sending away most of Gideon's army so that he was vastly outnumbered when he won), you never get the sense that God didn't have a plan in mind in those times.  God, as presented to us in the story of the Scriptures, is infinitely creative, using things we think are too broken, too small, too weak, or too dead for the purposes of bringing life.

Neither can we say that God is unaware of just how rotten and crooked things are in the world. The God of Abraham and Sarah, of Moses and Miriam, knows all too well our violence and cruelty, our destructiveness and our deviousness, our apathy and avarice.  So there's no way you can read the story of the Bible and coming away saying, "Maybe God is wearing rose-colored glasses and only sees a world of unicorns and rainbows." 

So what does it say that God's way of ultimately dealing with the brokenness and bitterness of things is to enter into it, not armed with lightning bolts and angel armies, and not carrying a sword or a gun, either, but naked with our humanity?  You can't read it as a mistake on God's part, or a lack of forethought, or an overly optimistic view of humanity.  God enters into this creation vulnerably, stripping down all of the invincibility we usually associate with the Almighty (the letter to the Philippians calls it Christ "emptying himself"), and bearing all of our frailty and fragility as God's only wardrobe.

This is not a cosmic accident or an unfortunate oversight.  This is not God being naïve and wrongly expecting the world to be a perfectly safe place.  The incarnation--God taking on human flesh--is God's chosen, open-eyed response to our cruelty and crookedness, because God is convinced that the way to bring us to life is not for the Christ to protect himself from danger, but to enter into the danger in complete vulnerability.  Let us make no mistake about it: God could easily have made another pillar-of-cloud-and-fire appearance, or sent down a legion of angelic soldiers, if that would have been what God chose to do.  God could have sent a representative who shot lasers from his eyes the moment someone threatened him.  God could have at least let Jesus carry some weapons for self-defense, if that would have been what we needed. But God won't trade our lives for divine safety, and Christ wouldn't rather keep himself out of danger if it meant leaving us in danger.  The vulnerability of Christmas is God's chosen strategy.  And the nakedness of the Word-made-flesh is just as God intended.

In the midst of all of the speeches that get made in this season about "the true meaning of Christmas," I kind of think we don't go far enough.  We probably know to say, "It's not about presents," and maybe we even go beyond, "It's about family togetherness," to say that it's about the baby in the manger.  But chances are, we are too nervous to go further and say that the reason for the baby in the manger is that God chooses to be vulnerable, rather than invincible, in order to redeem us.  We are afraid of the implications of saying that God's clear-eyed choice is to come, naked and unarmed into a world full of violence and hatred, born a brown-skinned Jewish peasant child in the backwater of the empire, knowing the costs of that choice.  We are afraid, I suspect, that if God's way of being in the world is to choose vulnerable love rather than threats and violence, then we will be called to walk in the same path of vulnerable love as the Word-made-flesh, Jesus.

We are right about that.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to love this world vulnerably as you have loved it... and as you still do.