Journeying with change

For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. John 6:38
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. John 1:14

What of God’s journey at Advent? The journey from heaven to earth, from glory to looking out through the eyes of a baby, to making very explicit humility and vulnerability at the heart of the Godhead, and boldness too.

I can’t imagine the thoughts and experience of God going through such a change. Much change, especially if we are choosing it, takes a modicum of boldness, and such boldness do we have here!

Wide-eyed wonder

Have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself.
- Philippians 2:5-8a
Thus, God in Jesus Christ, completes the picture of God’s love to us – the paradox being that the awe-inspiring, utterly transcendent God can also look upon us from the face of a helpless child.
God, who could seem distant and unreal became as real and immediate as a hungry, crying baby …God whom we traditionally think of as all-powerful , becomes a powerless child who would rather relinquish his power than live in splendid isolation from those whom he loves
- Maggi Dawn, Beginnings and Endings

Saccharine?

We are not asked to be sentimental and gooey for a season, any season, surely. So what might this looking at the birth of a baby, looking out on the world through a child's eye mean for us? Say about God?

We have here another journey, possibly the longest, slowest, hardest of journeys. And its also a journey for each of us - a journey from power to powerlessness, from grasping to letting go, from selfishness to selflessness.

How am I doing with that?

And now perhaps I have found meditating on a baby born over 2000 years ago a less sugary prospect.