The third week of Advent is closed. Witness to the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary school it might seem that the reflective spirit; the expectant hope of the season of Advent is broken. When lives are taken in spasms of violence it is heart breaking—but that so many this time were children. Children are not only innocent they are the very form of our hope. In their nearly new eyes we recognize the world as it is but is hard to see, the world as a wealth of things unknown; a place of inexhaustible treasure here to be discovered. Very young children love naturally and without reservation, it is a Christ-like quality. That twenty children were taken so callously, it is a loss we cannot escape. We know too the loss of the parents. An absence so terrible we cannot comprehend but we can imagine and the injustice of it is violence to all of us.
As a church we will gather; we will pray, hopefully in a spirit of both compassion and forgiveness. We will mourn also, because as a church we believe everyone is a part of the body of Christ, that all of us are as individually indispensable as the many molecules that make us. Those lost to violence; taken before the fullness of their time are an injury, a wound we mourn and pray to heal. Originally I wrote this week about feasts. I will still visit that reflection because even in loss, the spirit of celebration and its place in Jesus’ life can instruct.
Outside of the church it is a season of celebration already in full flush. There are many parties, many gatherings; a rush of celebration that many find happy and stressful. Jesus appreciated a celebration. He called himself a bridegroom and embraced the feasting and honor that accompany a wedding. Jesus, in life, consistently loved to gather people and food together. Jesus was called ‘teacher’ and food was, and is, a great reason to gather. The warmth and fullness of a feast or dinner was a fine place to teach, to discuss and instruct.
More than that Jesus’ might want to acknowledge what a great gift it was that God, through Him, was among us. Jesus expressed the power of God’s pure love. Jesus’ presence was radiant, the sick and the lost came to him spontaneously. Jesus’ long; strong hands were charged with the awesome power of God; He used them to comfort and to heal. The joy of His presence, the serene and ecstatic comfort of His love was without compare. How could those that saw and knew Jesus not celebrate? To be with Him was to be in the whirling and consuming presence of God and love. Yet Jesus was human. He had breath; His heart did not appear to beat irregularly. Those that came to him smelled his skin and robes and saw him walk. His touch, charged with the awesome power of God had the regular weight of human hands. So, Jesus’ physical presence; the frailty of his human body is essential to understanding the great power of God’s love. It is also one reason why the body is important as a metaphor for the church. We would not know the fullness of God’s love if Jesus had not walked among us. We would not know the fullness of it if Jesus had not died, naked to the world; the victim of every human cruelty and abuse.
Communion, one of our sacraments, is built on an important feast. The last meal that Jesus shared with his followers was a Passover Seder. The Passover Seder is an important ceremonial feast celebrating God’s deliverance of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. Jesus, as he did with other things, amended the Passover celebration with a simple observation. “Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he said, ‘Take this and divide it among yourselves; for I tell you that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.’ Then he took a loaf of bread and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’” [Luke 22.17-20] Jesus offered this in the expectation that his own end was near. For the Passover Seder a lamb was sacrificed, given to God at the Temple and ceremonially also in every household. Jesus, like this lamb, would be sacrificed; He would be given to God, not at the Temple but on a hill called Calvary. In death Jesus displayed the divinity in all human flesh and its fragility.
Jesus was the fulfillment of our hope. He showed God’s great, transforming power is love. God’s love is not above or outside of us, it does not boom like thunder or rain down inconceivable plague. God’s love is inside each of us. It is love that is familiar to us, the love that we know for friends and family and that love we fall into with others. The love we know is creation, the seed of God in all of us. Achieving the justice and transformative power of God’s love though is a challenge Jesus put to each of us. Our personal experience of love must be nurtured; extended and exercised in the world. God’s love is not only a comfort but a challenge to us.
Jesus showed this, the purity of His love gave sight to blind and healed the sick and through His teaching and example and the examples of the apostles and martyrs that followed, God’s love transformed the world. The world today is a profoundly more just and compassionate place. Jesus’ example showed too that fear and the absence of God’s love is a plague on us. God has no need to visit us with great plagues, with rivers of blood and innumerable locust, when, in the absence of God’s love that Jesus revealed to us, we bring enough loss and suffering on ourselves to instruct.
We are often forgetting ourselves. We prefer to feast; to celebrate the wealth of our inheritance. It is not wrong, it is a wonderful wealth we have—God’s love—and it is meant to be shared. We should gather in celebration of it, like Jesus and his followers did. We should know that love runs through us, that it is in our touch and company. But in celebration we should remember the responsibility of love. God’s love is a seed in us, if it will grow, if it will be a tree of life to sustain us, it will only be through attention and exercise. And when violence visits us, like it did at Sandy Hook Elementary, we must not look away. We have not loved enough. It is understandable that we would want to look away; many of Jesus’ own disciples did not want to look on Jesus’ body on the cross; the violence done to Him and cruelly displayed in death. But we must look. We are responsible; we have not loved enough.
In Jesus’ death God, perhaps, made a final promise to us—He understands. For all those suffering and the inconsolable, God understands. For the parents of those twenty children lost at Sandy Hook Elementary, in your pain and your anger, in your longing and your loss, you may go to God; God understands. You may pour yourself out, all the thorns of pain and rage and the deep water of loss; you may rest with God, God understands. God lost a child too. For all of us that have lost, we may take that aching absence to God and rest there. God understands. With time, when the pain fades and we may forgive, we will find love there, God’s love, waiting so that we may grow again. This is there among the quiet and expectant hope of the season of Advent. In our joys and also our suffering, God understands. God has, through Jesus, shown us a way to healing and justice and that way is love.
–KC Crain blogs at www.georgecrain.com
