Christmas offers a lesson in spiritual physics, one that Jesus built upon throughout his public ministry: To become great, one must become small.
Jesus, whom Christians believe to be not merely a great religious figure but God incarnate, did not randomly enter into history as a peasant baby in the Judean Hill country. So great was his love for all of humanity that he emptied himself of power and made himself vulnerable to every human frailty: sickness, emotional distress, and even violent cruelty. In doing so, he made a mockery of earthly power. True power, God’s power, increases according to the measure that it is given away freely. It cannot be hoarded, only poured out.
This paradoxical fact of spiritual physics ran through Jesus’s short public ministry, confounding his friends and enemies alike. Jesus implored his followers to take the lowest place at the banquet, not the place of honor; to give away all that they had, not to accumulate wealth mindlessly; to lose their lives out of love for him in order to save them.
Again and again, Jesus embodied this message. When brothers John and James asked him if they could be seated beside him in heaven, revealing their ambition, Jesus replied, “Whoever wishes to be great among you shall be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave.” He rode into Jerusalem on the back of an ass at Passover, not a king’s chariot. And on the night before his crucifixion, he took the place of the lowest slave and washed his apostles’ feet, one by one, a towel slung over his shoulder.
These actions stunned his contemporaries just as they stun us now, for they are so contrary to our nature. Ask anyone on the street who among us today is the greatest, and they will say, “Trump,” or “Obama,” or maybe even “Ohtani.”
But who would God say is the greatest? It would almost certainly be a name we’d never heard, a person so small, so perfectly conformed to self-denying and self-giving love as to be invisible.
And what does that say about the way we live? The way we understand our relationships? How do we form our society?
It says that we have it all backward. That our very nature is at odds with the Divine Order. That without a light shining in the darkness to point our way, we’d be lost. That we have no hope without Jesus, our savior.
This Christmas, may we delight in God’s decision to eschew the luxury and fanfare of earthly emperors and Pagan Gods in favor of the quiet humility of a stable, the gentle witness of shepherds, and the silent adoration of a young mother pondering all these things in her heart.
