“Do not be afraid”, the angel tells the man, Joseph. “The
child she will bear will be called Jesus. He will save his people from their
sins.” He will save his people from the consequences of sin which is fear. He
will overwhelm fear – and sin – with joy.
The Genesis story of ‘original’ sin makes it difficult to
see the full picture when it comes to sin and the way sin is ultimately
vanquished by joy. The story of the Fall focuses on disobedience which is born
of envy, as does the fall from heaven of Lucifer, the archangel of light. I am
no authority on archangels, or of what drives Satan to be as he is, but I think
that what he thought he had wrenched away from God, as he hurtled into the
abyss, was God’s supreme authority in respect to joy. Perhaps this is also one of the underlying
themes of the Genesis story.
If we take the Genesis story as a parable for the human
condition, it reads roughly as follows: Adam and Eve are metaphors for
innocence, for the innocence of pre-rational childhood, that brief period in
our lives when our senses begin to be awakened by the love which surrounds us. The
young child experiences, or senses, pure joy in the regard of a loving face,
including the faces of animals familiar to him, and in their voices. In them, he
experiences ‘original’ love, the love of the Creator who rejoiced in the
goodness of what he had made.
If the child does not sense that someone rejoices in his goodness
his adult consciousness will be damaged, possibly irretrievably. He will find
it hard to know joy as he goes on through life, so he will seek what he calls
happiness, or personal fulfilment, by any means available. These will become
increasingly demanding and damaging and they will ultimately consume him, and
possibly consume those whose lives he touches. This particular syndrome is what
we call human sinfulness.
The angel tells Joseph that the Jesus child has
another name, Emanuel, which means ‘God with us’. The Jesus child brings to our lives his
unvanquished joy, not as an overlay of superficial happiness, but as the joy he
has in beholding us, even in our sinfulness. So Emanuel is God with us in every
aspect of our separate lives, but not as a stern judge who sifts and weighs – and
finds us wanting; that is Satan’s job. Before he fell, Satan was God’s sifter,
or tester.[1] He tested Job and he was
later allowed to test the man Jesus in the wilderness. He never brought joy.
Emanuel is with us in his loving regard of us and it is this
love which generates hope in all our testing situations. Emanuel is with us in
all that is against us. He is in every perceived personal failure and in all
failed attempts at reconciliation, still reconciling. Emanuel is in failed
peace talks, in resolutions taken to save the planet from disaster, and in the
ensuing action or non-action. He is with us in every moment of hope, every
dream, whether it comes true or not. He is in the defying of evil, and in every
failed attempt to redress the wrongs of history, as well as in the few
successful ones.
Emanuel, the Jesus child, God with us, brings the love
needed to make the impossible happen. In the hidden depths of this love we
encounter joy.
[1] For this idea, I am indebted to
Walter Wink who portrays Satan as God’s servant and agent. See his Unmasking the Powers: The invisible forces
that determine human existence, ch.1
No comments:
Post a Comment