While praying this morning, I was thinking about God’s incarnation. Jesus was a human who patiently had to learn everything. He waits 30 years before beginning his ministry. So our God and King, in becoming all things human except sin, can’t jump into action. He needs to learn how to crawl, walk, and run…. He must become adept at washing His face and taking care of His basic needs. He needs to learn the scriptures and the Jewish laws, faith and customs. He has to work out how to connect to His Abba – the quiet time of prayer He will need to stay in constant Communion with His Father. He has to learn a trade and make a living to sustain His life.
And then there’s our Blessed Mother. She is with her Son every step of the way but she must learn to turn Her, “Yes,” into abandonment. She surrenders in the face of incomprehensible paradoxes. She has to let go when He begins His active ministry – acting through the Spirit as a human time keeper discerning when to jump start His mission at a wedding of all times and places. Later our Blessed Mother must let go again. She fulfills Simeon’s prophecy by allowing her pure, pierced heart full of God’s Grace to dissolve into a pool of sorrowful confusion.
How could this promised Gift from God – the Emmanuel be sublime in His extraordinary ordinariness? The story was perfectly encoded in every event and gesture. Our Mother pondered all these things in her heart – Her little boy Yeshua that she sang sweet songs to, and tucked into bed every night…
- who she felt and knew as a Mystery of our Abba’s Love,
- who lived a simple, basic human life with no fanfare,
- who in His short ministry gave hope to people hungry for God,
- who insisted the Kingdom of God was at hand,
- who forgave people sins and taught about compassion, gentleness, kindness, mercy and wisdom
- who assured us of a Way, Truth and Life that leads to an eternal inheritance
- who was seemingly silenced by the tyranny of evil…
Here’s the challenge, and how it relates to this moment of your journey to soar with Christ…
If God, as man, in the incarnation of His Son Jesus Christ, had to go through a process bound by time, then He must have equated and aligned His life to the same laws that govern ours. He who made the moons and stars – so humbled Himself, that He bound Himself to the necessary, time contingent forces of transformation…
So… how much more are we beholden to the same principles? We’re on an eternal journey to become full of His Love. Time is our ally. By the grace of His molding, we become co-participants and co-creators in relational manifestations of this Love.
Come Lord Jesus, come…
