Stable

Last weekend, we drove several hours to see a live Nativity that my brother is a part of. It was a re-enactment connected by narrative and music, but to me the most powerful part of the experience was simply sitting in the dimly lit stable — a real stable this time, in which we walked past the large heads of inquiring horses on our way in. The air was cloudy with hay dust, and had the light been brighter I’m sure I would have seen barn swallow nests tucked into corners. The abject humility of the Lord’s entrance into the world sank in.

No one could think up a story like that.

Of course I was thinking about the events in Connecticut on Friday, which fill me with horror and make me wonder in what possible way the world can have been meaningfully redeemed. In the face of such horror — not new horror, to be sure; murder of innocents is as old as humanity, but it is and has always been horror — it seems incredible to claim that Christ’s entry into the world has fixed anything.

I thought of this as I sat there on my hay bale, and the absolute originality of the Savior’s birth brought a whiff of truth. Divinity in a barn, of all places. God seems to have taken pains to say at the outset, “I am willing to descend. You cannot miss how small I am. Pay attention, because I am not coming in a way you would ever have expected.”

I would be lying if I said I didn’t wish he would set all things right. Too often “salvation” seems to mean comforting the devastated, rather than saving the innocents, stopping the violent, bringing justice. I feel exactly the same way generations of Jews did before Jesus came: “How long, Lord?” He has come and gone, without bringing that kind of salvation. (He himself didn’t experience that kind of salvation.)

But one mark of truth is its indifference to my preferences. God comes as a seed, growing in the quiet of a human womb, a stable, a human heart. His kingdom comes like roots, not like a conquering army. It galls me that so much evil continues in the world; I don’t know why he does it this way. But the fact that I chafe against it doesn’t make the gospel untrue, or unreal. It’s too counter to the way humans would do things to be unreal.

That’s admittedly an intuitive sense, not footnoted theology, and perhaps it’s only meaningful to me. But I find it a small, hard bit of comfort — not one to bring a contented smile and an “amen,” but something to take hold of in the darkness of this world my children are born into. We miserable fallen humans are not the whole story. Our Creator, however incomprehensible to me, means us well, and he’s at work. Even when I don’t see how.