Christmas is on the horizon and talk of cancelling it or reducing it is all over the papers! ‘Wow,’ I think to myself, ‘Can we really cancel a past event? I mean, Christmas is a commemoration or celebration. It’s when we think about an event that many of those partying don’t even believe in! You can’t cancel history all you can do is choose not to remember or act on what we remember.’
When I think of Christmas I think of how sad it is that we wait for a date in the calendar to remember the incarnation. This idea that God stepped into history in human form is so important to our daily lives. We might want to question whether God really understands how we feel in any given situation. I get that God is not a grey-bearded cloud dweller, but I want to know that God feels my mortality with all its hope, joy, love, pain, frustration and fear.
Exploring this question I reread the temptation of Jesus. I wanted to know if Jesus really knew what it meant to negotiate life with the restrictions of being human. Was he shielded by a residual touch of retained divinity? Or was it a case of – whatever happens daddy will come out of the clouds and get me!
Before arriving in the desert where the temptation took place Jesus needed to be born or incarnate as we like to call it. That meant first letting go of his pre-incarnate divinity. Complex stuff but how else could he have comprehensively become human? To be human meant letting go of the rich, deep reality of being divine!
In his letter to the Christians in a part of Greece called Philippi Paul captures this letting go business well. ‘…Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped…taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness…’
This is one of those things we can’t get our head around but as we delve into our ancient faith we learn to hold this tension. Two things appear to be in opposition and yet necessary at the same time. We call this a dichotomy. Jesus is fully God and fully man. So as Christmas comes along I might curb my partying but not my engagement with the challenge of Jesus’ human life on earth.
In that description of Jesus letting go we find what he picked up – humility and servanthood. I want to be like that – to prefer the needs of others, letting you in the doorway first, in fact carrying your shopping before lifting mine.
I digress, what about this temptation business? Today I want to just peek over a rock in that desert and watch this exchange with Jesus and the devil. First thing I notice is that we’re in an inhospitable place, dry and lifeless with no running water. Jesus has been intense in praying, fasting and chatting out aloud towards heaven.
Faintly and understandably, the sound of an empty rumbling tummy floats past my ear. Jesus must be really hungry from fasting. ‘Tell this stone to become bread’, says the devil tempting Jesus to use divine power to satisfy a physical need. Jesus doesn’t turn the stone to bread; he doesn’t break the commitment to fully experience humanity. Jesus sticks with the not considering equality with God bit.
For so many people in our community the Covid restrictions have felt like a dry lifeless desert in which we have felt hunger. That hunger has been physical for many people, others would say their hunger is for companionship, care even compassion in the face of growing debts.
Having faith is not necessarily an end to those things but in these situations I have discovered a great comfort in knowing this: that when I pray Our father in heaven hallowed be your name… can I mention my rumbling tum, big gas bill or loneliness, there is a chap sat next to God, Jesus, saying, ‘I know how that feels’.
Cancelled or curtailed Christmas celebrations, the history is the same God in Jesus came and experienced our humanity.
Rob Wykes 