Evil and Incarnation: Jesus Enters the World

Several years ago near the start of Advent, I awoke to a television report of five people murdered in a fast-food restaurant, and later that same morning I opened my newspaper and read that two robbers had shot a four-year-old girl in the chest when her mother could not silence her crying. My wife and I shook our heads in despair, offered a prayer, and then went on our way to work.

I turned on my e-mail, and the first message told me that a dear friend’s brother had been found beaten to death in his office. This time I sobbed. The intensely personal nature of the e-mail message broke open my heart and released the full fury of grief and sadness that had been touched but not mobilized by the morning litany of terror in the news. The distance of the public news stories collapsed beneath the burden of my close friend’s agony.

That year I carried all of those brutal killings to the lections for Advent and Christmas, and the weight in my soul compelled me to see the incarnation of Christ in a new way: God in Christ is subjected to the evil and violence of this world. God becomes as vulnerable as the victims in the fast-food restaurant who were found with duct tape over their mouths, as vulnerable as the four-year-old child shot in the chest because she could not stop crying, as vulnerable as my friend’s brother beaten in his office. For a moment I stop at the terror of this thought. I pray:

O Logos, do not become flesh, do not be born of Mary, do not send the angels to the shepherds, do not lay the little child away in the manger. Call it off before it is too late, before you enter this brutal, bleeding world. Stay high and mighty and powerful. Train your troops of angels, train the whole company of heaven and send them swooping down to stop the violence, the terror, the evil.

Then in the silence of my heart I see as never before that incarnation means a refusal to keep a safe distance between heaven and earth, between eternal good and mortal evil. If we are to be godly people we will have to follow the pattern of the incarnation, risking all for love, refusing to keep our distance from the brutality of this world. God is as vulnerable as a child in a stable, as vulnerable as a child in a supermarket whose mother cannot stop her from crying in the presence of robbers. This may not be the all-powerful God we sometimes pray for, but it is the God who becomes flesh to redeem us.