Advent: I'dve done it another way

You wanted to bring freedom? Release the captives? Well I’d have done it another way. Overwhelming numbers in a sea invasion from the Mediterranean. Shock and awe in the skies over the palaces of kings, loud enough to silence the rough-tongued Romans and the crazed rantings of their Jewish paramilitary opponents. But that’s not your way.

Yes you were bringing freedom, in fact you’d planned for it for generations, and through Abraham and Moses and David, through Egyptian captivity and Babylonian exile you kept your plan on course. But just when you judged the time was right, just when all the clocks aligned for the miraculous appearance of Messiah, you risked the whole plan of the ages on the response of a fourteen year old girl.

What if Mary recoiling in fear, hadn’t agreed to cloister the creator in the security of her womb?

What if Joseph had chosen respectability and not the responsibility of another mouth that wasn’t even his?

What if? What if?

And then when he came, the display in the skies was not to kings and rulers, but to loutish, drunken shepherds.

And there being no place in the inn, long-promised Messiah, whose home is the heavens, rested in a feeding trough.

The one who spoke the word and all came into existence, now cries his hunger and fixes his mouth round his mother’s breast to feed.

The fingers that fashioned stars now cling in complete reliance round the scarred forefinger of a teenage carpenter.

No days of national celebration for the birth of this king of kings, instead the sound of Rachael weeping for her children.

No I’dve done it another way.

But this was entirely your way, indeed, entirely typical of you. That here the hope of all the ages is found in this helpless, squirming, screaming, endlessly hungry baby. That because of this baby’s appearing, the war machinery of every army is destined for burning. All governance will be on his shoulders. This little baby….our Mighty God, and our Everlasting Father.

But for now we receive it in faith. One day we’ll see the baby all grown up and into his reign. Till then, in yet another Advent, we wait for our freedom. But not forever.