The one gift we can all receive

I think I’ve mentioned before that my favorite Christmas poem is Luci Shaw’s “Breath.” (What the Light Was Like, 2006). The poem is a series of rhetorical questions leading readers from the mystery of the incarnation and Jesus’ first breath to the mystery of the cross, Jesus’ last. The entire text is narrated from the dark. In the dark, the speaker wonders what it might have been like for God to arrive among his own creation. What did he notice (and love) in those first breaths, before his eyes even knew to open? In the last line of the single stanza poem, we arrive at the cross. The speaker asks, “Did he have any idea it would take all his breath to speak in stories that would change the world?”

It’s a puzzle, isn’t it? Teasing this out. Wondering if the infant knew he was actually the Christ. Wondering if he knew, even then, of the darkness he had entered, and the darkness that awaited.

Like a little kid, I love jumping down the rabbit hole this mystery presents. At every point of the story—that is to say, at every point of Jesus’ accounted life—the incarnation defies logic. You can’t theologize your way around or through it without occasionally suspending disbelief, accepting on faith, or shrugging your shoulders in puzzlement. But my questions also contain my deepest wonder.

Into the dark—our dark—God arrived to be with us. God. God! Entered into the soft center of our need.

In the Bible, names matter. They hold important information, and Jesus has many, such as Christ/Messiah—anointed or chosen one and Emmanuel/Immanuel—God with us. In Matthew 1:21, an angel appears to Joseph in a dream to tell him to stick by Mary’s side. He basically says to Joseph, “Hey, I know what this looks like. Your fiancée is pregnant and you’re not the dad. But that child is actually God’s kid. And I want you to name him Jesus, Yeshua, because “he will save His people from their sins.” So Joseph does this, but have you ever wondered why he trusts the dream? Have you ever thought about how scandalous it all was? What it likely cost him?

The scandal doesn’t stop there. Over the course of his ministry, Jesus would routinely surround himself with people his culture had written off. And Matthew, the author of one of the four gospels, was himself one of those screw ups. Matthew was a tax collector—read traitor, crook, outcast. He probably had a lot of money and very few friends. In Joseph’s dream scene, Matthew uses the Greek word sozo to describe the kind of “saving” Jesus would offer. Sozo not only means to save or rescue, but to heal, restore, make well. Matthew goes on to use the verb sozo thirteen more times in the gospel he authored, more than any other book of the new Testament.

Matthew. That sinner. That traitor. That thief. He must have known first-hand what it meant to need healing, and not just physical healing, not just saving, but the kind of healing that restores, that makes a person whole. The kind he couldn’t buy.

There’s a familiar worship song from the early aughts that repeats the refrain, “There is healing in his name.” I never knew the line was more than a figure of speech, that Jesus’ name iteslf is healer, but it’s true. When the name Yasha, a variation of Yeshua, is translated from Aramaic to Greek, the translation is sozein. The angel carried the message to Joseph—call him Healer, because he is one. Is it possible Joseph recognized more than a heavenly being in that dream? In the dark, did meet his own longing? His own need?

If Christmas is about anything at all, it’s this. God entered into the mess. And Matthew, who knew what it was to live down in that mess of greed and rejection and outsider status, walked with God. In the flesh.

And so can we. So can we find wholeness and healing and restoration. Not in the glittery lights and festive gifts under the tree. Not in keeping Christmas, whatever that might look like in your house. But in receiving it.

Breathe in.

Slow down. Shush the noise and the frenzy and the striving. You are invited.

Breathe out.

And here’s the miracle in every breath—God’s, ours. We, in receiving wholeness, are also called to participate in the restoration work of God, to be “little Christs,” as C.S. Lewis suggests in Mere Christianity. Little healers. What does that mean in practice? What does it not mean?

I have questions about that. And you might, too. But they are good questions to ask in a culture driven by self-preservation and self-elevation. And they are good questions to ask in the American church, often preoccupied by saving itself from extinction, or by proving its correctness. We cannot forget that Jesus was born to die. That he led by sacrifice. That he daily compromised his good reputation, if he ever had one, for the sake of those on the margins, whom he loved. I will admit that I have not lived a life that looks a whole lot like his. That I have at times been uncomfortable in the presence of difference and of pain. Even my own differences. Even my own pain.

Yet, where there is hurt either given or received, God is there. And we can take all those fierce and dangerous parts, those tender and vulnerable pieces of ourselves to the one who saves, to the one who heals. Not because he is all right and we are all wrong and it will all be solved by Christmas. But because he himself is love. Christmas is the story of a creator who loved us so much that he stepped into the mess, in order to sozo us.

May you know the peace of drawing near to that great love.