Eternity enters time

Yesterday evening I was thinking about the approach of Christmas. I know we’re in Advent, when churches more liturgical than ours focus on the approaching birth of Jesus, the Christ-child. We don’t really celebrate Advent, I think because the events of Christmas and Easter are so intertwined with Christian faith that they are in a large sense with us all the time. At least, that’s how I feel about it.

But then my mind wandered to questions about the timing and significance of the first Christmas and the first Easter. Why did Jesus arrive when he did? Why did God have to be born as a human baby? Why did Jesus die in his early thirties?

I have often asked myself why Jesus was born when he was. Jesus arrived pretty late in human history, however you date it. Of course, talking about this, we need to remember that God has been on the job of providing for our salvation since creation itself and even earlier. How come? He knew whom he was creating—us—and he knew that in giving us our own wills, he was allowing us to make wrong choices from which we would need saving. This is implicit in Paul’s statement: “_For he chose us in him (Jesus) before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight._” (Ephesians 1:4) Peter understood this too: “_He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake._” (1Peter 1:20). Peter’s verb _revealed_ implies not only that Jesus has been/is/will be a person of the Trinity for ever (cf John 1:1–4), but implies that somehow his death on the cross reflects an event that occurs in eternity, as the writer of Revelation says. Jesus is “_The lamb who was slain from the creation of the world._” (Revelation 13:8) The New Testament writers say very little about this dimension of Jesus’ atonement on our behalf. They couldn’t, because we can’t understand it during this present life.

So maybe God timed the earthy birth of his son Jesus at random. Or did he? Today there are almost eight billion people on this planet. When Jesus was born there were only about 200 million of us. It seems reasonable to me that God would have waited until a time when the world’s population was dense enough for his good news to spread and when there were technologies available that allowed people to travel in order to spread the word. Any earlier, and the population was too thinly spread for the news to travel — and there would not have been an adequate writing system. The first adequate writing system that large numbers of people could learn to read was the Hebrew alphabet used to write the books of the Old Testament! As it turned out, the Christian gospel spread westward across the whole Roman Empire and beyond in a couple of generations, and (not often mentioned these days) there were churches established all the way eastward to the border of China. The rise of Islam in the seventh century AD greatly reduced the membership of the eastern churches, and recent events in the Middle East have damaged them further, but they are still there. Most Western Christians have never heard of the Coptic (Egyptian, Ethiopian), Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, or Assyrian Orthodox churches or the Thomist church in southern India.¹

This may seem a very unspiritual account of the crucifixion’s timing, and it is exactly that. When God intervenes in earth’s affairs, he does so in an earthy and unspiritual manner. The same could be said of the birth of Jesus. Somehow, for me there has always been a bit of a disconnect between Jesus’ birth among farm animals and his ministry years. But that’s my problem, not his. This post was sparked in part by reading a meditation by Frederick Buechner,² where he writes during Advent

The mythology of our age has to do with flying saucers and invasions from outer space, and that is unimaginable enough. But what is upon us now is even more so—a close encounter not of the third kind but of a different kind altogether. An invasion of holiness.

It set me thinking, why didn’t Jesus simply appear as a readymade adult? After all, Enoch disappeared to Heaven without dying (Hebrews 11:5). Why not Jesus appearing without the messiness of being born? The answer is obvious, of course. Had he not appeared and departed like other human beings, he could not have modelled a human life for me, he could not have died in my place, and indeed he couldn’t have been raised from death.

And the crucifixion brings to mind another matter of timing. Why did Jesus die so young? He was in his early thirties. By today’s Western standards he wasn’t even in his prime yet (yet the Gospel accounts display his perfect maturity). Again the reason is earthy. Men probably didn’t live as long then as they do now, and if he had been crucified at fifty or sixty, that would have been not nearly as tragic as crucifixion at thirty odd. God was making it absolutely clear that Jesus was executed, because his terrible suffering and death modelled the way for his church.

So in Jesus we have the ultimate melding of the totally human and the entirely divine,³ of the utterly earthy and the utterly spiritual. Eternity enters time, divine enters human. And it’s this incomprehensible combination that I want to celebrate this Christmas—and beyond.