President Newt Crenshaw on how hope meets us where we are.
Feeling Busy?
The holidays, that stretch of time from Thanksgiving to New Year’s, can often feel loaded. We experience some of the best of what our Lord offers to us: good meals with those we love, reminders of what matters, times of thankfulness. Yet, we can also feel an overwhelming busyness, even a sense of loss with family — a missing member, a fractured relationship, a pressure to feel a certain way.
Advent is for us, exactly at this time.
Re-Understanding Advent
Advent, the weeks beginning four Sundays before Christmas, is the beginning of the Christian year. We often use it as a shorthand for Christmas, but it means something much more. Advent focuses us on what is to come, from the Latin ad, or to, and venire, or come.
What follows Advent, unsurprisingly, is an e-vent. In this case, Christmas.
This time of Advent is commercialized and full, and we all have rituals to fight against the commercialization. We bake cookies, play games, or offer our presence to each other. This is, after all, the great promise of Advent: a presence arriving unlike any the world ever imagined.
Jesus of Nazareth was born of a virgin as foretold by the prophet Isaiah. We read this in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, and the early church solidified this idea. The Nicene Creed, penned exactly 1,700 years ago, claims “by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary.” The creed claimed Jesus as “homoousious,” which is Greek for “the same substance” as God the Father.
Roughly 125 years later, the Council of Chalcedon clarified matters. Jesus was not simply “God with skin on,” some substance wearing a human body. He was “fully God and fully man,” a term that theologians call the hypostatic union. He was — and is — two natures in one person. God and man.
What Jesus Gave Up
Philippians 2 declares that Jesus “being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness” (2:6-7). Jesus set aside his privilege to become human like you and me.
And Jesus did not permit himself any excuses, like his fingers were crossed when the Trinity agreed to the whole endeavor.
- He gave up his omniscience, as we see by his question, “Who touched me?” in Mark 5 after a bleeding woman seeks healing from him, or plainly telling his disciples that only the Father knows the exact date of his return.
- He even gave up his omnipotence. In Mark 6, Jesus returns to Nazareth where he grew up, and Scripture records that he could not perform many miracles there, where a lack of faith was present.
- And he was no longer omnipresent: in becoming human, he limited himself to being in one place at one time.
The architect of the universe and agent of creation stepped inside our world and said he did not need to be everywhere at once; he would so deeply identify with us, he would so deeply align with us, that he gave up the glories of the Godhead. This is the miracle and awe of Christmas. This is what, whether we know it or not, we long for during Advent.
We long for God to be with us. To become like us: near, tangible, and present.
Jesus Knows the Life You’re Living
Jesus knew hunger and thirst.
He knew tiredness to the point of exhaustion.
He knew busyness to the point where he and his disciples didn’t have time to eat.
He knew sorrow at his friend’s death.
He knew temptation in the wilderness. He knew betrayal that led him to the cross.
He knew what it was like for people to hate him to the point of death, to misunderstand him, misrepresent him, or simply miss who he was.
He knew physical and spiritual pain.
He likely knew family shame, based on the circumstances of his birth.
He did this to be identified with us. With you. With me.
He walked by the Spirit’s power. He promised us this same Spirit in John 14 and elsewhere. Even more, he promises that we will do “greater works” than he accomplished. Perhaps God measures his works through us with a different tape measure than how we’ve learned to measure them.
The Ongoing Promise
This Advent and Christmas, you have been promised the Spirit. As an apprentice of Jesus, I encourage you to surrender to the Spirit’s power within you:
- Sit with the Lord
- Listen
- Open your hands to his gifts
This always leads to a posture of emptying ourselves, just as Jesus emptied himself, and receiving power from on high. Such a posture is a recognition of our limits; we are dependent creatures.
Jesus knew such dependency. We find in his life hope for our own lives, through the ongoing presence of the Spirit. This Advent, despite the busyness and pressure, may we first look for the ongoing presence of the Holy Spirit, a presence that both brings us back to our true selves and, with gratitude, to the feet of Jesus … the God who became man, just like us.
