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Recently I had a conversation with a friend of mine, a very holy Jewish man who has gone from being one of my doctors to being somebody with whom I can share many things. He’s semi-retired now, so he scheduled in a two-hour appointment for what took about 30 seconds of an annual visit checking for skin cancer. We spent the rest of the time philosophizing, theologizing, sharing the past year’s journey during which he had lost a young daughter in an epileptic attack. Toward the end of our mental meanderings he gestured, indicating that, if this [hold hands far apart] represented all we had been talking about, this [hold fingers nearly touching] indicates how close we are in our thinking. And then he said, “Maybe someday you’ll come to the exact same place and conclusions I’ve come to.” I surprised and pleased myself with my immediate response. “No, I don’t think that will happen. I’d have to give up Jesus.”
In the second reading from Hebrews we read “When Christ came into the world, he said: ‘Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; in holocausts and sin offerings you took no delight. Then I said, ‘As written of me in the scroll, behold, I come to do your will, O God.’” And the passage goes on to say that this will, which replaces the first law, is our consecration through the offering of the body of Jesus once for all. I think most of us Christians have spent our lifetimes trying to figure out what all that means, trying to wrap our minds around this Person into whom we’ve been baptized and who is central to our faith. Church councils have grappled with his identity and have come out with paradoxical statements about his humanity and divinity, and we’ve acquiesced to their words in faith. After all, it’s mystery, and mystery means its way beyond anything we can struggle to either know or articulate.
Someone recently said to me that it’s impossible to doubt there is a Creator; just look around at our world and the people in it. It’s also impossible to doubt that a spirit lives within us and draws us to be and to do good. But Jesus is another matter. And yet, we hold on to Jesus, as I found I did during that conversation, with a conviction that rose up from somewhere inside me. We really don’t know—can’t know—what Jesus means, at least not in the abstract. So, with Christmas upon us, we turn, as we do in today’s Gospel, to some everyday things that give us comfort. We find Mary visiting her cousin Elizabeth, probably to help her out, but also probably to find confirmation of the events, anything but everyday, that she was part of. It’s comforting to note that she probably needed comfort, too. After all, we humans live with one foot in the ordinary, the concrete, the mundane, and the other foot in miracle, the mysterious, the inexplicable. Christmas captures both of those parts of us, and we yield to the paradox they create with what can only be described as a childlike trust.
Maybe that’s why we seem to concentrate so much on giving things to one another during this season. Doing so somehow grounds us, allows us to speak about our care for others in ways we might be embarrassed to do at other times of the year. Busying ourselves about decorations and holiday rituals and special foods reminds us we’re human, earthy, hungering for love, needing to be saved. Contemplating the God whom Micah describes as majestic, as having a greatness that shall reach to the ends of the earth, sets us soaring off into thoughts that defy words and leave us silent. The one sentence that seems to pull it all together is a short one; it is the way this Micah passage ends: “He shall be peace.”
Now that perhaps we can handle. We know what peace feels like in our bodies. Peace is a rest from worry and anxiety; it’s an opening to what is around us moment to moment; it’s signal is a lack of tension and a relaxation of our muscles and a freedom that allows us to flow as an instrument of God resistance-free for our own lives and for those of others. We also know what peace feels like in the spirit which is also part of who we are. In peace we put down our efforts to figure things out, to grasp the contradictions in life and, at this season, in the Life that is Jesus himself, divine and human, God and creature, all-powerful and helpless, eternal and in time and ticking off the years the way all of us do. “He shall be peace.” Knowing that just may be enough. So we give ourselves to the stories of this season about the human and the divine and we, like the children we are called to be, just acquiesce to it all. Who knows who this Jesus is? Who knows how it all adds up? Nobody does. But there’s something both divine and human in each of us, as there is in Jesus. We open to it, and we accept it. And we find peace in all this marvelous paradox, dressed up in lights and gift-wrapping and tinsel and parties and good food and carols and liturgy and loving kindness to others, mirroring the loving kindness of this mysterious God. Who is human, too. I surprised myself with a readiness to embrace him, when I was put to the test. And yet, of course I was ready; we’re all ready. I doubt any one of us could give up Jesus, even though we can’t figure him out. He’s at the heart of our faith, our faith; nothing more, nothing less.