“Lift up your heads, O you gates; be lifted up, you ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who is this King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, O you gates; lift them up, you ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who is he, this King of glory? The Lord Almighty – he is the King of glory.”
Psalm 24:7-10
Advent, like life, is bittersweet. And this is as it should be. “In this world you will have trouble,” Jesus said.
Yet, he didn’t finish there. He continued: “But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
And that is the unadulterated sweetness of Christmas. He came to us. He overcame everything that troubles us.
This has been his song since the beginning. Unlike the ancients, we are privileged not to hope for it but to know it. We who live in the end times (and that is no prophetic prediction, only a reader’s observation that we are living neither in the beginning nor the middle of God’s great story), we are privileged to know how trustworthy his promises have always been. He promised us a Savior and an everlasting King, and he kept his promise.
And so we have no doubt that every promise he has made is a solid stone beneath our feet. We are unshaken. We have tasted, we have seen that the Lord is very good (Psalm 34:8).
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of Egypt. Open wide your mouth and I will fill it. … with honey from the rock I [will] satisfy you.”
Psalm 81:10,16
Do not be afraid (Luke 2:10).
Those words still echo from the day of his birth. How is it that we forget? Why do we close our ears?
We busy ourselves with words, with rules, with judgements and controversies. We worry. And, yes, we continue to live lives rooted in fear.
Afraid we’re doing it wrong. Afraid we’ll lose it all. Afraid someone will find out. Afraid there’s nothing to look forward to.
Afraid, afraid, afraid.
We set up our fences. We wonder who’s in, who’s out. We criticize. We condemn.
Why?
When he had risen from the dead the command was the same: Do not be afraid (Matthew 10).
How would you live if you believed there was no need to ever be afraid?
Who else but Hopkins to wake us up, to dazzle our eyes and ears, and to fill us with expectation? A poem for you on this final Monday of Advent:
from “The Wreck of the Deutschland”
Now burn, new born to the world,
Doubled-natured name,
The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled
Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,
Mid-numbered He in three of the thunder-throne!
Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;
Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;
A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fire hard-hurled.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins
O come, Thou Key of David, come,
And open wide our heavenly home;
Make safe the way that leads on high,
And close the path to misery.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
O come, O come, Thou Lord of might,
Who to Thy tribes, on Sinai’s height,
In ancient times did’st give the Law,
In cloud, and majesty and awe.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
I can’t say with certainty what kind of Messiah the Jewish people were waiting for two thousand years ago. However, I’m fairly sure that Jesus was not it.
I imagine that many were waiting for a powerful king. A revolutionary. A fiery-tongued savior with a sword in his hand.
What they got was a carpenter from Nazareth who spent his time with the wrong sort of people.
I’m sure that if any of the disciples had been told before meeting Jesus that their Messiah would turn out to be a local carpenter who turned the other cheek, they would have been disappointed. What about the glorious daydream they’d worked up during the long years of their wait? Why couldn’t God do it that way? What kind of promised-kept was this?
And yet, I doubt that any of those men felt disappointed as they began to preach after Pentecost. I think they would have said that the Jesus-who-is far outshines the small revolutionary of their earlier imaginings. By then, they could see reality with God’s own eyes, like Stephen, who “looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:55).
God’s plans often surprise us. It seems they rarely play out exactly as we’ve pictured. And yet, I do not think it is a matter of trading our beautiful hopes for God’s slightly-less-exciting version. Ultimately, this life is not about the sacrifices we make for God. It’s about God’s unbelievably good love for us.
Accepting God’s version may sometimes look like settling for less, but it is always, always more. It is always better.
Jesus was and is the ideal Messiah. A king and a servant. A lion and a lamb.
God has long been writing the perfect story. In the world. In our lives. At Advent we remember how good the story is. We also remember that we haven’t even made it to the ending yet. The villain has not yet been vanquished.
“And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming” (2 Thessalonians 2:8).
The world’s happily-ever-after is not yet here, but it is breaking in. Can you see it?