Love came down at Christmas
As Christmas approaches I want to reflect on the fact that God loves us. He has come to us and revealed Himself in Jesus, to rescue us from the mess that sin has made in all our lives. Two quotes I have read in this past week underline how this God of love calls people everywhere. First of all from Bono … speaking of a time when he went to St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin at the end of a concert tour on Christmas Eve:
The idea that God, if there is a force of Love and Logic in the universe … would seek to explain itself is amazing enough. That it would seek to explain itself by becoming a child born in straw poverty, in [dung] and straw, a child, I just thought: "Wow!" Just the poetry. Unknowable love, unknowable power, describes itself as the most vulnerable ... I was sitting there, and the tears came down my face, and I saw the genius of this, utter genius of picking a particular point in time and deciding to turn on this ... love needs to find form, intimacy needs to be whispered. To me it makes sense. It is actually logical. It is pure logic. Essence has to manifest itself. It is inevitable. Love has to become an action or something concrete ... There must be an incarnation. Love must be made flesh.
Secondly, after hearing the sad news of the death of journalist Christopher Hitchens last week, I was intrigued in an obituary by a conversation he once had with Pastor Douglas Wilson, with whom he toured the US to debate the existence of God. At the end of a film of their tour, Collision, Hitchens relates to Wilson an exchange he had had with Richard Dawkins:
If I could convince everyone in the world to be a non-believer and I’d done brilliantly, and there’s only one left - one more and then I’d be done. There’d be no more religion in the world, no more deism, theism, I wouldn’t do it. And Dawkins said, “What do you mean you wouldn’t do it?” I said, “I don’t quite know why I wouldn’t do it.” And it’s not just because there’d be nothing left to argue and no-one left to argue with. It’s not just that; though it would be that. Somehow if I could drive it out of the world, I wouldn’t.
What links these two quotes from men of such different faith perspectives? I think it’s because each had had moments of revelation. Whether Hitchens, a renowned agent provocateur of Christian faith, would have acknowledged this is another thing, but the fondness he showed in that moment for people of faith suggests that something of divine nature was happening.
God loves us. He loves us so much that he pursues us and seeks us out, as Paul says in Romans 5 … While we were still sinners Christ died for us. By His Holy Spirit He loves to make Himself known in ways that may surprise and move us. ‘Love came down at Christmas,’ and the living Lord Jesus born as a baby in Bethlehem wants you to encounter His unfathomable love today. Greg Harrick in a commentary on Francis Thompson’s classic poem The Hound of Heaven, speaks about ‘God's "other worldly," all conquering love - a love that changes "rebel" into "reconciled" and whose intensity can only be likened to a blood hound hot on the trail.’ Turn to this loving God who came down in Jesus and you will meet Him.
Trevor Patterson |
