Adoration of the Light
Image: “Adoration of the Shepherds” (1609) by Caravaggio (source).
Not so long ago I sat in the pews of a church during Advent, snow falling outside, the warm light of candles within. A woman read from Isaiah 9:1-7 and then people in the pews sang, “O come, O come Emmanuel.” My young son sat next to me and whispered, “This is my favorite part!” Just as the chorus of the hymn rang out, “Rejoice! Rejoice!” He sang loudly, smiling at me. He was rejoicing. I was not rejoicing. In fact there was nothing terribly joyful about me at all. Every bit of pleasure was drained from Christmas for me that year. My husband had just been appointed as senior pastor to a new church. We moved from family and friends to a new place. I was lonely. Nothing felt comfortable or familiar about Christmas that year. The same woman who read the passage from Isaiah helped me to my car that evening. I was loaded down with the normal accessories of young motherhood. As we said our goodbyes and thank-yous, she paused and looked up into the deep darkness of the rural night sky.
“We don’t ever have to walk in darkness and if we feel it creeping, we just look at Him.”
What we look at matters. I was looking at the empty moving boxes piled up in my living room. I was contemplating family parties I wouldn’t attend. I was beholding my loss rather than my Lord. That conversation in a dark parking lot may have taught me more about the meaning of Christmas than all of the twinkling lights, trees, and parties I have ever enjoyed. While I still find pleasure in the dressings of the season, in that moment I was reminded the real joy of Christmas is to “look at Him,” and ask in wonder like Mary, “How will this be?”
There is no human cleverness that sneaks up on the Incarnation as if to say— “Ah ha! I’ve got it! I figured it out.” No, it’s the other way around. The Incarnation surprises us. The truth of our need for the infant Christ is made so acutely clear when we contrast our persistent unfaithfulness with the totality of God’s will to reconcile us to himself in holiness. He set the foundations of the earth and laid waste to unformed chaos with unadulterated goodness and order. He set humans over his creation; we betrayed him, and were evicted from the light and life of his presence. The marvelous and unbelievable truth is that God did not want a home that did not include his children. His mighty acts of transcendent power rightly inspire awe. He leads with pillars of fire and smoke. He parts impassable waters, brings rain and drought. He sends manna from Heaven. He routs empires with angel armies. He topples city walls with songs of praise and puts wisdom in the mouths of prophets that we may know his will and heart. But it is when God empties himself of all power and takes on sinful flesh to be a sin offering for us that we are moved to repentance and love toward him. He runs the gauntlet of Hell that we may be spared the eternal suffering of separation from his presence.
Our God—the God of all existence—became a human being.
How this came to be is an impenetrable mystery. Attempts by the wisest and most brilliant theological minds to get beneath this question ultimately dissolve into rolling waves of description and doxology. It cannot be comprehended!
“Man’s maker was made man, that He, Ruler of the stars, might nurse at His mother’s breast; that the Bread might hunger, the Fountain thirst, the Light sleep, the Way be tired on its journey; that the Truth might be accused of false witness, the Teacher be beaten with whips, the Foundation be suspended on wood; that Strength might grow weak; that the Healer might be wounded; that Life might die”. – Augustine of Hippo (Sermons 191.1)
Contemplating the Incarnation reveals Christ in every page of scripture. The significance of the birth narratives should only deepen as we immerse ourselves in the word and the life of faith. Isolated seasonal engagement with the story of Christ’s birth inevitably relegates it to a place of superficial sentimentality. In the holiday landscape of a thousand Christmas fables, the radical invasion of heaven into earth can easily be reduced to a quaint tale about a country girl and a baby. We must not be tempted to interpret the themes of light and dark, the redemption of generational sin, and the fulfillment of promises as poetic and symbolic rather than realized in flesh and blood. While the story fulfilled in the Nativity may be more Steinbeck than Dickens, to be perfectly accurate, it’s no work of fiction at all.
Calling it “the grand miracle,” C.S. Lewis identifies the Incarnation as the “central miracle asserted by Christians”; all other other miraculous events prepare for, display or are consequences of the Incarnation. Furthermore, all miracles of God manifest the particular nature, intention, and purpose of the Incarnation. Galatians 4:4-5 names this purpose: “But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship” (NIV). The finished work of the Incarnation and subsequent death and Resurrection of Christ results in restored sonship and daughtership in the new creation through the second birth.
The plainspokenness of the Annunciation between Gabriel and Mary in Luke’s gospel is almost comical given the glorious work at hand. The moment has arrived and Gabriel greets Mary with unusual honor, calling her “highly favored” and proclaiming that the Lord is with her. Although she is unsettled and confused by Gabriel’s words, she listens to the pronouncement of her impending pregnancy. “How will this be?” she asks, and Gabriel explains, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God” (NIV Lk 1:35). While scripture gives no account of the moment when Mary, in her earthly frailness, was overshadowed by God’s Spirit, the opening verses to both Genesis and John’s gospel reveal the spiritual meaning of the moment. In Genesis the Spirit of God hovers over an unordered creation. John tells us it was through the Word, the unborn Christ, that “all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind” (NIV Jn 1:3-4). God’s first act of bringing order to life was speaking light into existence and separating it from the darkness.
Here in this out-of-the-way village God brings Genesis to its fulfillment. The Holy Spirit hovers over Mary and speaks a new Word into existence, and that Word is light enfleshed. By this Light God begins the separation of light and dark within every person. Mary's child is the consolation of Israel, the light of the Gentiles, destined to reveal the hearts and be the rise and fall of many. Christ is the word that divides sharper than any two-edged sword splitting soul and spirit, the sword that pierces Mary’s own heart.
Standing in the long shadow cast by the sin of our ancestors who stole fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Mary receives, rather than takes, a new fruit, the first fruits of all creation. Her words, “Let it be done,” echo God’s own pronouncement to bring forth light into creation and foretells her Lord’s surrender to be pierced in Gethsemane. In that garden God the Son, on his knees, submits to be the seed of fruit planted. “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (NIV Jn 12:24). He prays the barely prayable prayer, the only prayer that can bring creation, order, and light: Let it be done according to your will. It seems like madness, like a cruel joke, to his disciples, to his mother, that the culmination of Jesus’ miraculous birth should be death. But they did not know! They did not know that his descent all the way down into the heart of darkness and death itself would destroy it for all time! Death could not hold him. He is the light that shines in the darkness, and darkness did not overcome him.
The Incarnation begins the restoration of the intimate and ordered home that was destroyed by creaturely disobedience. The Father has always desired fellowship with his children. Human beings in our fallen state reject God’s good order and receive the darkness into ourselves. "This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil” (NIV Jn 3:19). In his mercy Christ does not leave creation in darkness. By his birth, death and resurrection we may now be led by the Light come to us from heaven, who desires not only to guide our feet in the path of peace, but to fill us with his own resplendence. We are meant to be Christ-bearers like Mary, and like Mary it will mean a piercing of our own souls. When an angel of the Lord appears and reveals the miraculous birth of the Messiah to lowly, insignificant shepherds in the dark of night, they do not hesitate to be led by the light. They go and see. When Magi, led by the light of the star, bring the same news to Herod, King of the Jews, he appears as if he desires to honor this long-expected child, but in reality plots to kill him. Herod is ruled by the darkness.
In the Northern Hemisphere the celebration of Christmas comes at the edge of winter, which for many people in the world is a season marked by fewer hours of daylight and dropping temperatures. We welcome the reason to celebrate with festivities and decorations the occasion of the greatest Light entering our midst. In the natural cycle of seasons the months following winter may be brighter and warmer, but the eternal reality of the Incarnation means that all time preceding Christ’s birth is darkness, and all time ever after that moment is illumined by the Radiance of the Father’s refining fire of love for us. The winter of our exile is over.
See! The winter is past;
the rains are over and gone.
Flowers appear on the earth;
the season of singing has come
(Song of Songs 2:11-12, NIV)
We are now eternally in the season of singing and rejoicing, and like the Shepherds our song must be, “O come let us adore him!”
Maggie Ulmer is Resource Director for Spirit & Truth, Managing Editor of Firebrand, and one of the hosts of Plain Truth: A Holy-Spirited Podcast.