That God would reconcile with humanity and the sentient beings of this planet by choosing to insert Herself into our time, never ceases to astound me with wonder. Poor John The Baptist. No wonder he went around screaming and ranting. Though I expect he got still when he saw Jesus.
It is a brilliant plan of reconciliation is God’s goal. Me. I would let us burn in Hell. I have tried reconciliation on earth and it often just gets me a black eye. And that, perhaps is one reason why it’s best that I am not God.
I am starting, this late in Advent, to feel my inner Scrooge making an appointment for coffee with my inner Smeagol. Neither of them should even touch caffeine let alone meet for coffee in my psyche, even for a moment. The one crusty with life’s disappointments and human failure, greed and grouchiness and the other bent over, curled up, clammy in greed and wanting…my preeeeeciousssss. No. My inner Scrooge and my inner Smeagol most definitely should not chat, unsupervised. At all really. Ever.
But we humans, mired as we are in our body-wants, our mind-wants and our money-power wants; we humans are animals, like all other animals, though often less kind than your average deer or three-toed sloth or chipmunk or Kai-the-dog.
So God, bridges the gap by taking the humble role of the inviter. God says, “I am coming to you and from within and among you I will invite yo to the table. Punch me. Hard. And when you are done, may we try again to be friends?” God loves, even as we humans punch with words and actions.
God grows in a womb. God emerges from that womb wet, slimy, screaming with streaks of mother-feces here and there. God is cradled by a loving father even able to ignore, in faith, the humiliation of his wife’s foreign pregnancy and its social ramifications in a small village (if word gets back…and it will.) God sucks on a girl’s frightened breast. God coos at the moon and the stars and looks at the cosmos not from a divine throne, but from a warm, cradled arm beneath thousands of kisses from a Jewish Mother who will prove to be overly attached. Like they are.
God experiences time in a new way, love in a new way, hope, human friendship, human betrayal – in short everything I experience. His holiness brought on some crazy mean things. Power was freaked out by Him. Power kept trying to attack him. But He kept slipping through to safety. It still happens. One need not be Jesus to have it happen.
I can chat with this kind of God. If He were on a throne set on a sea of glass surrounded always by sycophantic angels then God would be little different from the people of power here on earth, to whom I also do not want to pray. Heaven would be little different than earth. Power and grotesque boot-licking-grovelers attending to them. Name a person with a title and that is generally what you get on this planet. But this God seems to be different. Powerful yes. But desirous of friendship and willing to submit to our middle-school antics non-the-less.
So yes. This human, me, I want that God to come and light my life from the inside. Is Jesus the only way to God? Is the trunk the only part of the elephant? And yet, I choose Jesus, and with that choice it becomes incumbent on me to live differently, as best I can. Today. Because the God of the Cosmos has come to save me. And I want to be saved. Need to be.
