He Came to His Own

He Came to His Own.  Even the municipal water treatment pond can be beautiful in the frosty mist at sunrise. The blue heron searches for breakfast under the surface of the water unconcerned of the invisible reactions happening in the water’s chemistry. The cattails bend in the breeze unaware of the source of their nutrients. The warming sun causes a fog to rise from there just as intricate as any fog anywhere, whether it floats above cathedrals or cemeteries.

Beauty, like faith, hope, and love, as well as all things virtuous, descends from above; it does not ascend from below. Just as God is the source of goodness because he is infinitely good, so also God is the source of beauty because he is infinitely beautiful. In that sense, beauty is not found in the eye of the beholder, but in the character of the Creator. Beauty is God’s reflection. As such, beauty must retain a virtuous quality since God is the origin, the destiny, the center, the object, and the subject of all beauty. All beauty therefore derives from him. That doesn’t mean that all beauty must be religious in nature, which was the thought in the Middle-Ages. It only means that beauty’s job, in any sector, is to lift our gaze to our beautiful God who has made all things and is remaking all things beautiful. The opposite must also be true, if God is not seen or seeable, then any potential beauty that might have been present has been hijacked, commandeered, and steered by unworthy pilots to an unwholesome harbor.

Creation, then, is merely a repeater, an echo, a herald. Though shattered at the Fall, the creation still reflects the Creator in its razor-sharp shards. One of those million shards of a broken world is the water treatment pond on a December morning. By lifting the attention of passers-by to the Creator, then it is still doing its job, so to speak. If it can still do its job, so must we, reflecting the Creator and representing his character on earth, as it is in heaven.

When Christ came to earth at the first Christmas, the Apostle John makes an interesting observation. “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him” (John 1:11). Grammar is important here—he came to his own things/places (neuter), and his own people did not receive him. The stars knew him. The animals knew him. The manger knew him. The trees of the field knew him. Dare we say that even the latrines and trash pits of the world knew him. These are examples of “his own things/places” (neuter), but “his own people did not receive him.” Therefore, it is not an exaggeration to say that while the inn at Bethlehem recognized him, the innkeeper did not welcome him. The beauty of the Incarnation did not direct the gaze of the little town of Bethlehem toward heaven (except for Mary, Joseph, some shepherds, and an uncountable multitude of angels). It could and should have. But the inhospitable people did not expect, did not see, and did not receive Messiah. Though they didn’t back then, we can today see the beauty of the long-ago moment, and glimpse the beautiful One who is reflected, even though he must be seen through the shards.

Always Winter But Never Christmas

Always Winter But Never Christmas.  In the imaginative world of Narnia from the mind of author, C.S. Lewis, came one of the best lines about Christmas that has nothing to do with Christmas technically. It rather has to do with the long shadow cast if Christmas were absent.

In Lewis’ masterwork of fiction, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), the eight-year-old heroine, Lucy Pevensie, knew nothing of Narnia when she punched through the back of the commonest wardrobe in England to the uncommonest, magical land called Narnia. But the Narnia that Lucy found lay under a two-fold curse: (1) the White Witch ruled as usurper, and (2) Aslan the Lion, the rightful ruler of Narnia, had not been seen in Narnia for many years. Doubly cursed, Narnia was plunged into an unnaturally prolonged winter, which was succinctly summarized by a citizen of Narnia, Mr. Tumnus, to his eight-year-old visitor, Lucy: “It is winter in Narnia . . . always winter, but never Christmas.”

To children (and many adults!), Christmas is what makes winter wonderful. Without it, the cold is interminable, the dark days are intolerable, and one’s socks never really dry out from sloshing through the partially melted snow made gritty and dirty by traffic. Without Christmas, winter is punishment.

To humans, a Christmas-less reality is far worse than a Christmas-less winter. Worse still, if Christ’s birth does not link directly to his resurrection, or if his resurrection does not guarantee our resurrection through faith in him, then, as the Apostle Paul wrote, “we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:19). In Narnia and on Earth, winter is the intruder. But the eternal day has dawned. “The people dwelling in darkness have seen a great light, and for those dwelling in the region and shadow of death, on them a light has dawned” (Matt. 4:16).

In Narnia, when Christmas broke through winter, the surprising appearance of Father Christmas in Narnia marked the beginning of the end of the curse of the White Witch (chapter 10). "I've come at last. She has kept me out for a long time, but I have got in at last. Aslan is on the move. The Witch's magic is weakening." Alas, Father Christmas delivered serious gifts to Lucy and her siblings, for there was an unavoidable battle ahead. Lewis’ allegory leaps easily across the thin divide between fiction and non-fiction, between a story with a moral and a moral with a story. Like in Narnia, our world’s Christmas is the beginning of the end of the curse; the rightful King Jesus has arrived.

The fact of the biblical Christmas allows for and fits together in a cohesive unit all the other facets of Christ. Of course, Christ lived a sinless life, died an innocent death, rose bodily in the resurrection, ascended to heaven to sit at the right hand of Majesty on high, and saves everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord in faith. All those later works and words of Christ follow his Incarnation, and not merely chronologically, but essentially! Theologian, J.I. Packer, said that the Incarnation is the “supreme mystery.”

 

It is here, in the thing that happened at the first Christmas, that the profoundest and most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. “The Word became flesh” (Jn 1:14); God became man; the divine Son became a Jew; the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. And there was no illusion or deception in this: the babyhood of the Son of God was a reality. The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets. Nothing in fiction is so fantastic as is this truth of the Incarnation (J.I. Packer, Knowing God [1973], 53).

 

Later, at the conclusion of Narnia lore, Christmas took a curtain call, of sorts. A portal opened from Narnia to Aslan’s Country through an ordinary-looking stable, hidden in plain sight. “Its inside is bigger than its outside.” “Yes,” said Queen Lucy. “In our world too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world” (The Last Battle, p. 103).

I and the Father Are One

I And The Father Are One.  Among the geekiest category of theologians, there is a special groan over their Christmastime spoofs (to say “jokes” would be too generous a word). Memes like, “St. Nick says, ‘Ho, Ho, Homoousios,’” and “He’s making a list, checking it twice, going to find out whose denying the full deity of the Son,” and one that assumes a retro Batman and Robin comic vibe where Robin begins to say: “Christ was not divine but was created by…” but is interrupted with a slap by Batman with the superimposed face of St. Nicholas stating, “Heresy!” (Just for fun, google: “St. Nicholas memes eternal procession of the Son.”)

No one laughs at these parodies except for a few dweebs who giggle for ten minutes. I must be ultra-silly since I have been smirking about it for over an hour. The beginning of the story, which the theologians take for granted, is required to land the punchline.

St. Nicholas, long before his memory was unfortunately merged with Christmas folklore, was the bishop of Myra (Turkey) in the late 200s, which was the same time that a heretic, Arius, was openly preaching a false gospel. Arius, from reports by his contemporary Athanasius, was known for shouting on street corners, “There was a time when he was not,” referring to Christ, whom Arius claimed was made into God’s Son later as a reward for his goodness, but “he was not equal, no, nor one in essence with the Father” (Athanasius, De Synodis, 15; On the Incarnation, 54). Christians had always affirmed that Jesus was someone distinct from the Father, in his personhood, which the Scriptures teach. Arius argued that Jesus was something distinct from the Father, in his essence, which the Scriptures do not allow. Arius, therefore, levied the use of the word, homoiousios, meaning: “of a similar substance” to describe Jesus’ essence, which is decidedly less than divine. Athanasius contended for the word homoousios, meaning: “of the same substance.” Ah, what a difference one letter makes!

Despite widespread persecution, the church was far more upset with the Arian Heresy. To put it to rest once and for all, the church fathers called for a meeting at Nicea (325 A.D.). At the Council of Nicea, Ambrose of Milan summed up sound biblical theology in his explanation of John 10:30. By combining the personal pronoun, “I,” with the definite and singular name, “the Father,” as the compound subject of the verb, “are” (present, active, first-person plural form of the verb “to be,” which denotes one’s very essence and existential state of being), Jesus’ conclusion is astounding: “I and the Father, [we] are one” (i.e., one and the same essence, yet distinct in person). The unverifiable story of the Council of Nicea was that when Arius showed up and began to spout his heresy, Nicholas slapped him full in the face.

“I believe in . . . one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.”

The Fullness of Time

The Fullness of Time.  The Steve Miller Band was not entirely wrong when they sang, “Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future” (Fly Like An Eagle, 1976). The sensation of time does seem to slip past us into the next moment, and the next, and the next no matter which barricades we set up in its path. We cannot stop or slow or outrun time. Time marches toward the future … except when it didn’t. When Jesus entered our timeline, time stopped.

Time reaches toward Jesus. When Jesus was in the future, then time leaned toward the future. When Jesus was in the present, then time pooled in the present. When Jesus was in the past, then time stretched toward the past. It is accurate and biblical to assert that the Lord is not the servant of time, but rather, time is the servant of the Lord. Like a comet is always leaning toward the sun with its tail trailing behind, so does time always lean toward the Son with its shadow trailing behind.

Paul spoke of this mystery in the context of a child awaiting the father to declare the day when childhood was over, and adulthood had begun. In Greek and Roman culture, that day was “adoption,” when the father—on a day that he had in mind all along but told no one (Gal. 4:2)—named the child as his heir. The child, who previously had no legal standing, in an instant received full legal standing in the family and in the community. “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Gal. 4:4-5). It was not God who was waiting on time to reach its fullness but rather time waiting on God to announce when “fullness” had arrived. When God declared “enough,” then time pivoted.

Time waits for no one, except if that person is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who came in the flesh to redeem those who were in bondage to the cold, cause-and-effect legality of the Law. At the Incarnation, time shifted from slippin’ into the future and started measurin’ everything based on Christ’s historic, monumental, redemptive arrival. Jesus truly split time in half. “And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God” (Gal. 4:6-7).