“fear not”

Well, I suppose it’s not Christmas on this blog unless I trot out my beloved Philip Yancey. Every year at this time, I seem to be excerpting this and excerpting that, so in keeping with that, well, tradition or compulsion, whichever you prefer to call it ….. an excerpt from what I think — I think — is my favorite Yancey book, Disappointment With God. How can a person read that title and not want to read the book? I’ve said this ad nauseum, but I don’t care: Philip Yancey’s books are a life raft to me as a Christian. He gets it. He gets it. He gets how much being a human gets in the way of being a Christian. He just gets it. I love him. I owe him.

Onto the excerpt … a Christmas excerpt. It’s not too long:

“Fear Not”

We hear these words every Christmas season at church pageants when children dress up in bathrobes and act out the story of Jesus’ birth. “Fear not!” lisps the six-year-old angel, his bedsheet costume dragging the ground, his coat-hanger-frame wings flapping ever so slightly from the trembling of his body. He sneaks a glance at the script hidden in the folds of his sleeve. “Fear not, for I bring you good tidings of great joy.” Already he has appeared to Zechariah (his older brother with a taped-on cotton beard) and to Mary (a freckled blonde from the second grade.) He used the same greeting for both, “Fear not! …”

These were also God’s first words to Abraham, and to Hagar, and to Isaac. “Fear not!” the angel said in greeting Gideon and the prophet Daniel. For supernatural beings, that phrase served almost as the equivalent of “Hello, how are you?” Little wonder. By the time the supernatural being spoke, the human being was usually lying face down in a cataleptic state. When God made contact with planet Earth, sometimes the supernatural encounter sounded like thunder, sometimes it stirred the air like a whirlwind, and sometimes it lit up the scene like a flash of phosphorous. Nearly always it caused fear. But the angel who visited Zechariah and Mary and Joseph heralded that God was about to appear in a form that would not frighten.

What could be less scary than a newborn baby with jerky limbs and eyes that do not quite focus? In Jesus, born in a barn or a cave and laid in a feeding trough, God found at last a mode of approach that humanity need not fear. The king had cast off his robes.

Think of the condescension involved: the Incarnation, which sliced history into two parts (a fact even our calendars grudgingly acknowledge), had more animal than human witnesses. Think, too, of the risk. In the Incarnation, God spanned the vast chasm of fear that had distanced him from his human creation. But removing that barrier made Jesus vulnerable, terribly vulnerable.

The child born in the night among beasts. The sweet breath and steaming dung of beasts. And nothing is ever the same again.

Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of man …

For those who believe in God, it means, this birth, that God himself is never safe from us, and maybe that is the dark side of Christmas, the terror of the silence. He comes in such a way that we can always turn him down, as we could crack the baby’s skull like an eggshell or nail him up when he gets too big for that. (Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark)

How did Christmas Day feel to God? Imagine for a moment becoming a baby again: giving up language and muscle coordination and the ability to eat solid food and control your bladder. God as a fetus! Or imagine yourself becoming a sea slug — that analogy is probably closer. On that day in Bethlehem, the Maker of All That Is took form as a helpless, dependent newborn.

“Kenosis” is the technical word theologians use to describe Christ emptying himself of the advantages of deity. Ironically, while the emptying involved much humiliation, it also involved a kind of freedom. I have spoken of the “disadvantages” of infinity. A physical body freed Christ to act on a human scale, without those “disadvantages” of infinity. He could say what he wanted without his voice blasting the treetops. He could express anger by calling King Herod a fox or by reaching for a bullwhip in the temple, rather than shaking the earth with his stormy presence. And he could talk to anyone — a prostitue, a blind man, a widow, a leper — without first having to announce, “Fear not!”