Precisely because it’s hard to imagine God being God in the world we need lots of stories: baby-sized and all the way up to whale-sized and to keep going, no doubt, to the reaches of our language and of our imaginations.
What’s more, this Jesus will grow up and teach us a different way to live in a world like ours. And his method will not be to reassure pretty good folks like us that we pretty much see things for what they are. He will tell stories, violate norms, ask questions meant to provoke or expose our deep confusion about how God sees things. He will tell us that the ones we see as last, and least, and lost are the first ones God seeks out and finds. He’ll insist that we find our lives by laying them down for one another. That we save them by losing them. And he will live out what he taught us all the way to the incomprehensible love we see on the cross and in the resurrection of that love, even on the far side of death.
Your skin and your bones are so wonderful, and they are good even on the days when you and I wonder about that, and they are carrying us around this big, tumultuous world. And yet, you and I are also so much more than skin and bones. I wonder about those moments when the realization grabs us, as surely as Elizabeth grabbed Mary. When we are touched and touched; when we feel someone squeezing our hand or something opening our heart that and know there’s more – more to us, more to our lives, more to this world than we had previously dared to imagine.
Maybe the God of Advent is a God who loves us too deeply to be anything but angry and hurt when we build our lives on nothing. A God who grieves when we turn from the offer of God’s selfless love and build false selves for the sake of a world that says, “Sure I’ll love you if it’s in my interest to do so. Knock yourself out proving you’re worth my attention.” Maybe Malachi rages like a jilted lover because God won’t let us settle for lives built on such fickle, conditional loves instead of on the one great Love that will never let us go.
Advent, and life for that matter, are not only about Jesus coming to us. They are also about us coming to him. Are we willing to draw near to him in faith? Are we willing to acknowledge and to accept help beyond what we can do for ourselves?