The Great Reversal

From Vaux Community, London

Walking with the crowds, carried along by the pressing forward. Each one eager to get ahead, but each one starting the same - born as a baby and from then on struggling towards meaning, power, and influence. Be someone, be remembered, make a big impression; leave some indelible mark in your three scores years and ten.

From birth, a struggle to find eternity, to burst through life with such dazzling intensity that everyone will remember forever. But walking the other way, picking out a route against the crowds, a solitary figure passes me, passes all of us, a quiet chaos in the crowd.

Christ, eternal, omniscient, creator, beyond time, source of wisdom, and beyond petty claims of influence...in very nature God, slips into reverse and walks back past us - away from kingship, away from power, away from influence, away from eternity, away from wisdom, toward infancy, calmly stepping into the body of a tiny child.

And even as this baby grows, figuring out how to control the body he himself designed, he still walks the other way, realizing that life cannot be found in the struggle for permanence, but in giving it up.

The great reversal subverts me. Tired of pressing forward, I realized I need to turn, for what I have been searching for has just walked past me the other way.

I have been contemplating this while working retail this holiday season (it's the holiday season for retail already!) I keep being reminded that the fact that Jesus came to earth in the form of a tiny, helpless baby and in the humblest of circumstances is more than enough for me at Christmas. It's more than enough that the Savior of the Universe became human and lived and breathed with us for 33 years before sacrificing himself on the Cross, for me and my sins. What else could we possibly need or desire?