When Christ promises that he comes to bring us life in abundance, that promise is not lopsided. He comes to open our eyes to the world and its deep need, to our neighbors and their pain, to the abundance of work that must be done for justice. And he comes to show us how to dance, how to look up and see the beauty of this amazing world, to remind us to gather with friends around a table and tell stories and laugh until we cry.
Jesus wants to become fully immersed in our lives. By waiting in line, he honors the norm of the community – the community in which he wants to be fully enmeshed. He wants to be an abiding presence and a change agent within us. He wants to be a companion, waiting in line with the rest of us.
From the beginning of Jesus’s story, it’s clear that, in spite of Israel’s hope for a messiah who would deliver them definitively from the circumstances of their lives, we see their savior and ours caught in the same world that they and we are caught in. Redemption, the story tells us from its onset, will not come by way of a conquering hero or by one who transcends the limits the rest of us live confined by. Redemption, whatever it is in this story, will come from within those confines.
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.