We mean well, but do badly.
We intend to love our neighbors, our kids, and our spouses, but end up being hateful for all the wrong reasons. How many marriages have been ruined over a missing cup of coffee?
One response is just to give up and accept the fact that we are selfish. Good luck to those people, but here is hoping they stay out of my neighborhood. For the rest of us, we must face the irritating truth that we want (so badly!) to be better than we are. We cannot give up hoping, because the alternative to hope is barren intellectually and poetically.
Atheism means to kill God, but kills hope instead.
Religions without Christmas offer an incomplete or false hope. They offer a second chance or some way for us to work to fix self, but self-help is useless. There is nothing we can do to fix the messes we make. Only those with no sense of self wish to have their good works and bad weighed in a scale in the hopes that one can make up for even one evil by doing twenty other goods.
Sometimes we are tempted by the illusion that if we just got a second chance everything would be fine.
It is a good thing we do not serve the God of Second Chances, since most of us need many more. A second chance is not really what we need anyway. Once you have messed up badly enough, you need a do-over, but those aren’t really possible. If life had a “save game” feature, and we could erase what we had done, and that might help the people we have hurt.
It would not help us. We still would have chosen badly. We would know that when the moment of truth came that we fell short.
What we need, what I need, is a new soul. We need to start fresh. Is this possible?
Some religions suggest it is, but none but Christianity go far enough. The problem with the lot of us is not just personal, but cosmic. Things go badly even when “it is not our fault.”
It is not, after all, just our wrong choices that doom us. It is our very condition, the perversity of living in a broken world. When humankind turned from the Divine plan, all of creation became unable to interface properly with men and women. Our desires are out of order and the “timing” of cosmic events frequently mock even our virtues.
We are out of sync with the cosmos. Moderns can easily forget that all the self-help in the world would not fix the deeper problem of humankind.
Even if we were as pure and holy as Mary, virgin in body and mind, we would need Divine help. Mary could not save herself, let alone humanity. Only Divine providence could initiate the pattern of events that would lead each generation to call her blessed.
The very message of the Angel to Mary reminds us of how God-needy each human, even the best of us, is:
And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.
And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.
And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God.
In his commentary on Luke, John Noland points out (page 58): “The idiom ‘to have found favor’ means to have had extended to one the magnanimously bestowed favor of a superior. . .” Even the Blessed Virgin Mary cannot come to God in her own merits. There is an unbridgeable gulf between God and man so far as humans are concerned. Only God can choose to bridge it and Gabriel’s words to Mary stress this amazing grace. As Howard Marshall notes, “the stress is on God’s choice rather than human acceptability.” (NIGTC Luke)
The good news is that God did not stay far off. He came down to Earth, beginning with the womb of Mary, and saved humankind from the disaster we made. God gave Himself hands and then got them dirty in our salvation. He suffered, He cried, and finally He died in order to make all human suffering, tears, and death meaningful.
It is all His grace and it is all to His glory. This is the good news that Angels can sing about on Christmas night, but cannot experience wholly.
The joyous news of Christmas is that God is bringing the cosmic back into sync with Himself. God chose. The focus is totally on Him, His sovereign Will, and divine Grace to humankind. It is this that Mary models perfectly for us in Luke’s account. Her “let it be done unto me” must be my response if I would live in the better world that is coming.
God could not merely proclaim forgiveness (though He did that as well), but purchased it. Men and women had turned from God and defied His Will. We threw grit in the mechanism of the cosmos. We twisted beauty into ugliness. This could be pardoned, but pardon was not enough.
The deep difficulties we created by our abuse of freedom had to be fixed without destroying freedom. Instead of using brute force, which could have fixed the cosmos but would destroyed us, God came down and became fully human. He cried, he lived our pain, in order to bring the natural and supernatural world back into harmony from the inside out.
Since the birth of Jesus that cosmic process of redemption has continued. It is all of His grace. God would have been within His rights to destroy us, to start again, but He chose not to do so.
Why?
The mystery of God’s love for us is the answer. God loves us. He knows, even we know in our better moments, we don’t deserve it.
His love created a pathway for each man and woman to be declared not guilty while still a sinner and then to be transformed into new people. As Athanasius summarized the message of Scripture: God became man so that man could become (like) God.
The new people, with redeemed souls and bodies, will be able to live in harmony with that Paradise of God. Mary was the first person to come into harmony with the future. In that sense, her humble and quiet spirit is more modern and “futuristic” than anything found on today’s screens.
Our new soul cannot be marked by our sin. It is as beyond our debasing touch as far as our ability to save ourselves from ourselves is beyond our reach.
We can be little children again and can say, without a trace of irony, what Blake wrote in A Cradle Song:
Sweet babe in thy face
Holy image I can trace
Sweet babe once like thee,
Thy maker lay and wept for me
Wept for me for thee for all,
When he was an infant small
Thou his image ever see.
Heavenly face that smiles on thee.
Smiles on thee on me on all,
Who became an infant small,
Infant smiles are his own smiles.
Heaven & earth to peace beguiles.