God is love, overflowing love to all the world … we celebrate the birth of Jesus within that larger perspective.
And, we are told, God is in control, God is always with us.
In our religion, the two blend together, and their relation is not critically evaluated. The first I believe and want to follow. The second troubles me.
The day after Jesus was born, the day after any Christmas we celebrate, the world goes on, and we go on with the world, in its own way, which is plainly not under the control of God who is love.
God’s loving came in the baby Jesus. His infancy was a fragile endangered little moment in the world of Herod. The love of God in the man Jesus, who went around doing good, was opposed, thwarted and rejected in numerous ways. The love of God which turned Zacchaeus round was discounted by the people who despised Jesus for going to eat with a sinner.
The love of God in Jesus was torn to pieces by those who misjudged, crucified and hated him.
God’s love makes its way in the world, and for the world, but is not in control of the World – that seems to me to be manifest. Does it seem so to you?
Rather than being in control, the love of the loving God is frail, and marginal in the world.
Anyone who would believe and affirm that God is love, that God loves the world, and that God lives to shed love abroad in the world, should see clearly that he or she is choosing a narrow dangerous way, risking disappointment, setback, even to death.
Naturally we revolt against such an option, all sense and all self-care reacts against it.
What ever gets anyone to risk this way? Despite all that counts against it, there is a mysterious power and authority in the call and example of Jesus. There is surprising attraction in the vision of God who is love in and for the world, enough to overcome the hesitancy and fear which is within us.
For all the attractive enabling of this call and vision, it does not achieve control of the world. That has not happened and is not happening.
But there is something here which spurs ventures into frailty, limited pilgrimages of love, making a witness that can easily be dismissed, challenges which seem too foolish to risk.
Nevertheless, people do set out to walk the path which Jesus pioneered and presents to us. They follow him, whether they name him or not. They may start with hope of a glorious battle and quick success, with Jesus the Lord of the world … but again and again the world they live in shows them that it is not as easy as that … for the world is not controlled by the love of God.
So again and again, they find themselves as would-be lovers with God who are frail with God in the world, discouraged in the project of loving the world with God, sharing the suffering of God in the world, and shattered as the cry arises in them, ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
The love of God is frail and vulnerable in the world, but – it is persistent and resilient.
Jesus is raised, Jesus lives, Jesus comes again and again to discouraged broken followers, who ‘hoped he would be the redeemer’.
Jesus comes again, not making a new and different world, for the world for us is the same sort of world it was for him the crucified. Jesus comes again to say to those who hear, to those who are listening, longing for his voice they heard before, to those who have walked with him and want to go further, even though he has been vastly impeded and taken from them – Jesus comes again and says, in effect, there has been an interruption, but not an irreparable cessation, so now we will pick up where we were broken off, and carry on in the mission of loving, even though it is frail and fragile, in this hard world, even though it includes taking up the cross.
What has been taken away by what we have lived through together, says Jesus, is any easy, confident conjunction of the idea that God is love and the idea that God is in control, a conjunction leading us to talk as though the world could be changed at a stroke, and that Christmas gives us a baby whose birth in Bethlehem means ‘there’s a new way beginning from tonight’.
What goes on, and what is given to us to go with, is the loving of God-not- in- control, but rather God loving and so calling people into his kind of frail and persistent loving, in a world that needs the love it does not understand and indeed resists.
From this comes a view of Christmas which is closer to God in Jesus.
It will be a Christmas which does not enable facile and untrue talk about peace on earth, as though the angels’ song was heard in Herod’s palace and changed hearts and values there.
Rather Christmas that tells us God is with us, in a baby who as yet can do little about the world, who even when grown up, lives a fragile limited life, but fills it with doing good, and with inviting us all to follow him, in his little seed-sowing work, hoping and working and suffering towards the fullness of the peace and life of God who is love.
We do not, we cannot yet see this promise realised, so that, without mistake, every eye sees it, as it blazes from one end of the heavens to the other.
We can walk with Jesus in his way, feet on the dusty ground, persisting in little lovings, holding on to the hope in them, bearing up under the disappointments they carry. We can live honestly the truth that God is love, and that God’s love is fragile, vulnerable, limited in the world as it is, even the world as we may make it with our best endeavours.
We can choose to put our treasure, our hope, in this frail love of God, and live with the resilience of God, who suffers, knows contradiction, but does not give up.