I’ve loved being part of our Christmas Eve Crib Service, a unique mix of nativity play, pantomime, and Momentum rally. The line which gets me every year is when God says, ‘This is my Son, come and see: in fact they say he looks just like me’.
Paul tells us that in Jesus the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. This is the central, seemingly absurd, claim of Christianity: that the creator of the universe dwelt in fullness in a particular human life. For many, perhaps most, it’s hard to accept. But I think Paul is saying that in Christ we see everything we need to understand God’s nature. And in the course of the Gospels the character of God is set out and expanded upon in different ways: in Jesus’s hidden years, in his ministry, in teaching, in action, in signs, and in his passion, death, resurrection, and ascension.
But perhaps these are all expanding on the essence of what we see in the stable of Bethlehem. In Jesus’s coming as a baby we see the heart of the divine, the very image of the invisible God: helpless, naked, obscure, instinctively seeking relationship with others, with nothing to offer except unconditional love; casting aside everything, perhaps in vain, to come after just one who is lost, even you, even me. Gloria sing the angels, but God’s glory is not in the acclamation of the multitudes, his is not the power of Herod to kill with the sword, or of Caesar to compel by decree. Rather it is the love that the Trinity had before the foundation of the world. And this is what is lying in the manger. The power of weakness. The vulnerability of love. God looks just like this. Come and see.
The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. And we have seen his glory. Alleluia.
Chris Braganza
