is perhaps one of the most familiar and most sung Christmas carols: Joy To the World.
The line most capturing my perplexed attention is this:
"...and let every heart prepare Him room."
What? Let every heart prepare Him room? This may be a wonderful sentiment, encouraging all that are within earshot to open their hearts in invitation to the Lord. But how can that possibly be? How can that logically happen?
The very essence of the Christmas Story stretches the imagination– to think that the One Who is great enough to have created this vast universe could somehow step inside His own creation. How can anyone enter inside of something he has created? One's creative output, regardless of how great and wonderful it might be, is always something less than its author. Van Gogh's Starry Night– as beautiful, dynamic, and deep as it is– remains simply a collection of fascinating brushstrokes of pigment on a piece of fabric, and hardly capable of containing the life of Vincent himself.
If stepping inside of the creation/universe wasn't amazing enough, how could the God of heaven, the One Who breathed this space-time into existence, package His very essence and Life into the tiny envelope of a human embryo, carried within the womb of a teenage girl? Such a thing beggars belief. There is no way that we can successfully believe such an outlandish concept.
Even more than the simple impossibility of shoe-horning the infinite into the finite, how could One Who claims to be Perfect, Holy, and untouched by evil of any sort come "down" into this obviously and tragically imperfect and broken universe? How could He? Why would He? This not only beggars our belief, but shows us the clear limits of our own imagination. This simply could not be.
But I must come back to the phrase that initiated my thoughts here: "...let every heart prepare Him room." If the One Who is greater than all cannot logically fit into this immense universe, how in the world is He going to fit into my own heart?...any heart? I know the simple and dark confines of my own heart only too well to know that there is absolutely no way on earth that He, the Majesty Who reigns on high, can fit into this dingy, tiny space.
Moreover, how can the Perfect One, from Whose Holy Face all evil flees, consent to come into my own troubled, conflicted, and fickle heart? This is surely the Impossibility of all Impossibilities.
Only the God Who can do all things has such power. And this power is fueled by a love that knows no bounds. The disciple John, who walked, ate, and lived with this Emmanuel (literally, "God With Us"), wrote that "The Word became flesh and lived among us and we have seen His glory– the glory of the One and Only..." Although it is unimaginable, illogical, and numerically impossible, it is yet a fact of history. This is the miracle of Christmas, declared by so many carols that are sung at the end of each year. The Creator entered His own creation.
But here is the even greater miracle (and, yet, contained within the first): this One Who is greater than all, desires above all, to enter the incredibly small confines of the incomplete, individual human heart. This, in fact, was the sole purpose of His entrance into the universe– to inhabit human lives and change them from darkness into light. To make the broken whole, and to fill the empty. To make the impossible possible. To make the unimaginable the familiar. This is the truest and deepest miracle of Christmas.
"Joy to the world!"
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>>> Except for quotations, all text and images are Copyright, Bill Brockmeier, 2015. All rights reserved.
1 comment:
Great post !
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