Christmas, and the Incarnation that it celebrates, has its foundation in creation. The Genesis stories of creation begin with “heaven and earth,” but that turns out to be merely a warm-up exercise for the main event, the creation of human life, man and woman designated as the “image of God.” Man and woman are alive with the very breath (“spirit”) of God. If we want to look at creation full, creation at its highest, we look at a person-a man, a woman, a child. There are those who prefer to gaze on the beauty of a bouquet of flowers rather than care for a squabbling baby, or to spend a day on the beach rather than rub shoulders with uncongenial neighbors in a cold church-creation without the inconvenience of persons. This may be understandable, but it is also decidedly not creation in the terms that have been revealed to us in Genesis and in the person of Jesus.
All this arrives as most welcome good news in the birth of Jesus: here we have creation as God’s gift of life, creation furnishing all the conditions necessary for life-our lives. Good news, truly, what the Greeks named akerygma, a public proclamation that becomes a historical event. The birth of Jesus is the kerygmatic focus for receiving, entering into, and participating in creation, for living the creation and not just using it or taking it for granted.
In the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel, his re-writing of Genesis, we read, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” St. Matthew and St. Luke begin their Gospel stories with detailed accounts of Jesus’ birth. St. Paul in his letter to the Colossians, the first written reference to Jesus’ birth, calls Jesus the “first-born of all creation.”
Creation is God’s work, not ours. We accept and enter into and submit to what God does–what God made and makes. We are not spectators of creation but participants in it. We are participants first of all by simply being born, but then we realize that our births all take place in the context of Jesus’ birth. The Christian life is the practice of living in what God has done and is doing. We want to know the origins of things so that we can live out of our origins. We don’t want our lives to be tacked on to something peripheral. We want to live origin-ally, not derivatively.
So we begin with Jesus. Jesus is the revelation of the God who created heaven and earth; he is also the revelation of the God who is with us, Immanuel. The original Genesis creation, the stories of Israel, the lamentations of the prophets, the singing of the psalms–all of these make sense in light of that one birth that we celebrate at Christmas. The theologian Karl Barth goes into immense detail to make this single point: “We have established that from every angle Jesus Christ is the key to the secret of creation.” – Eugene Peterson (from God With Us)
ADVENT ACTION
In the beginning…GOD. Origins. God breathed into humanity and now we bear the image of the Creator. In the song “Original of the Species” written as an encouragement to his daughters, Bono artistically reminds us that each human life has immeasurable value because of Origin – we are one of a kind because we stem from the ONE. We want to know the origins of things so that we can live out of our origins. Genesis and St. John provide the life-giving framework for our identity – our Origin in God, in the person of Jesus.
1.) Rediscover your Origins by breathing in the Creation accounts from Genesis 1 & John 1.
2.) Listen to the emotion in the lyrics behind this U2 song and open your heart to ponder the reality that each human being is born in the image of God.
3.) Reflect on how this truth (value in our Origin) rightly orients your perception of yourself and how you interact with your family, neighbor, co-worker.
Origin-ally..
ReplyDeleteWow - So moving.