An Outlandish Christmas

Photo through Unsplash by Magnezis Magestic

This Christmas I’m thinking of what my pastor, Josh Condon, calls the “outlandishness of what God did for us in Christ.” What a phrase! Josh meant the depths of God’s gritty love that led the Creator to make himself one of us, walking the dusty roads and detours of creaturely life. I’m thinking, too, of the lavishness, the extravagance. God didn’t have to become a human person, vulnerable to the horrors and hurts of human life, but God did it anyway, did it out of a persistent mercy, an obstinate love.

And sometimes you reach for not just words but images to help an insight come alive. The natural world can often help here, reflecting in its patterns the reality of larger things. A case in point: As a young person growing up in Santa Monica, I loved watching the ocean. While walking or jogging along the beach near our home, the expanse spread out before me, an occasional gull soaring and cawing overhead. I’d often set my gaze on the ocean’s horizon. The water had both a clear defining line and a hint of something beyond, something elsewhere and faraway. Have you ever spent time watching an expanse of water, finding the immensity moving you, the sheer distance quieting you? And I’d stare at the waves coming again and again, relentless in a reassuring way. Sometimes, if the breakers were big enough, I’d see surfers catch them and try to ride their round, roiling foam.

One of my theological heroes, Athanasius, living much of his life in ancient Alexandria, Egypt, likewise had his imagination stirred by vast waters. And it was coming across a passage of his that made me think of the ocean’s even larger lessons. What he saw in his seacoast town even led him to a flash of understanding about the second Person of the Trinity. He, too, glimpsed the lavish goodness of God in Christ.

I got to see that very same sight, years ago, staying for a week in Alexandria, guest lecturing and teaching theology to ministry students studying at the Alexandria School of Theology.

I was remembering that day how Athanasius had insisted, against some who painted a theologically anemic Jesus, that Christ was fully, gloriously divine. The bishop of Alexandria devoted an entire book to how Christ in all his glory had become human, a paperback I had with me, On the Incarnation. I loved the way he delighted in how in Jesus God had become one of us, how God showed up on the premises in stunning full array. There was plenty of drama swirling the debates during Athanasius’s times. He was exiled more than once for insisting on a fully, truly divine Jesus. I wonder if he got cantankerous. His detractors, picking on his small stature and dark complexion, dubbed him the black dwarf. But if slight, he was mighty. If little, his eyes pierced through larger realities.

And while reading Athanasius’ lines, giving the section one more glance before a lecture for my students, I saw that one of his analogies drew on the Alexandrian coast just yards from my apartment quarters: “Such and so many are the Savior’s achievements that follow from his Incarnation,” he wrote, “that to try to number them is like gazing at an open sea and trying to count the waves.” He was talking not about arithmetic here, no mere counting. No, he continued, “One cannot see all the waves with one’s eyes, for when one tries to do so those that are following on baffle one’s senses.”

The sage here becomes a poet. Scrutinizing a vast open sea, the constancy of the swelling, pounding surf set him off into awe. For here he discovered not only bafflement but also enchantment. How do you account for something like the hugeness of the uncharted ocean? You don’t. But for all that you don’t turn away in despair or resignation. Maybe you turn toward it all the more with wonderment.

And while the ocean’s immensities may amaze us, Athanasius pushes me to new layers of astonishing meaning, how Jesus’s “great achievements” in his becoming “flesh” were born of love—for us. Here in the Son of God compassion becomes bound to a gritty life on earth—tragedies and triumphs and all. True, the more Athanasius pressed forward to apprehend God, the more the pastor and teacher met the One Who Cannot Be Managed, the more he found God staying just out of reach of comprehension. Yet not in a troubling way, no, rather in a way that led to more desire and longing. One wise voice of our own times, T.F. Torrance, saw how Athanasius tried to put down the words, but how “what he wrote fell far short even of the fleeting shadow of the truth in his mind.” Don’t our moments of clarity sometimes seem fleeting even as they leave hope in their trailing wake?

But that experience of fleetingness or incompleteness need not diminish our love or devotion. For Athanasius, the mystery of It All only enlarged his enjoyment of an infinite God made vividly personal—even intimate—in Jesus. Bigness did not mean a lack of attention or a diminishment of affection. Vastness could also lead to limitless love—for us, to our deep delight, and our great relief. For this kind of infinitude pointed to more for us to experience, to what Jeremy Begbie calls “abundantly more.” I mean an experience beyond us in way that is still for our good and that answers our deepest longings for flourishing.

And I realized that morning of my lecture how this picturing of God’s steady help has nothing glib about it. The “achievements” of Christ were hard won. Athanasius was not just talking about Jesus’s coming, but also his dying. “The birth of the baby Jesus,” preacher and author Fleming Rutledge reminds us, “was not simply a sweet occasion to be memorialized in peaceful nativity scenes.” In Jesus’s life and death, the ancient theologian knew, we see not only the intimacy that Jesus enjoyed in his earthly communion with his heavenly Father, but also the Father’s sacrificial giving of Jesus that ended in crucifixion.

This is a God who, becoming one with us, identified with our tumult and heartbreak, came close in the profoundest way. We never know God completely, of course. We cannot. But ours is not to give up trying, for what lies beyond our easy comprehension intrigues us, and still invites us deeper; behind it all is an ocean-full of blessings.