God’s gift pulls us from our suffering

By Harold Jantz and ChristianWeek | December 24, 2016

Some years ago our family received a letter from an elderly great-aunt in Russia, a woman nearing 100 who had lived through the Soviet years. She and her husband were among the many exiled under Josef Stalin, who lost their home and belongings, and ended up in a city far from where they once lived. Outside her immediate family she had no contact with the faith community she once had known.

Yet in her letter, written on a snowy February evening, she said when she looked up at the moonlit sky, it seemed as though she saw the face of God gazing down on her from the moon and found great comfort and was thankful. She added a poem of hope about the future! How was that possible?

Albert Einstein once related what he considered the most important question of all: "Is the universe a friendly place?"

I’ve puzzled over the attitude of the old woman in Russia. Why did her Christian belief give her the comfort that we live in a friendly universe? To discover the answer I’ve revisited the story of the birth of Jesus. This story reinforces the claim that despite the grief visited upon our planet, it is a friendly place.

The account of the child born to Joseph and Mary in Bethlehem two millennia ago maintains that in Jesus, God himself has come to bridge the distance between himself and his creation. Surely, it is a claim that begs to be accepted in faith, yet it places itself in time and space — in history — as a story that will transform those who embrace it as true.

In the first place, it’s all about our own reconciliation with God, then with the weak and the poor, and ultimately with the alien and enemy. When the child was born to Mary and Joseph, the gospel account tells us that the first persons to get the news were herdsmen taking care of sheep on Judean hillsides. They were told where to find the newborn Saviour and heard a heavenly messenger say, "Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on Earth peace among those whom he favours." Peace on Earth!

The great missionary of the early church, the Apostle Paul, decades later wrote a letter to the young church in Rome that insisted that while we were "weak... sinners... (even) enemies... we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son."

Right from his birth, the story of Jesus is one of reconciliation between creation and Creator. When Saint Paul tries to interpret the meaning of Jesus, he writes "the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now... (and) we ourselves... groan," waiting, as he put it, for our "redemption."

It’s this belief that God has created the universe and come to us in Jesus Christ to renew, redeem and restore it that makes of this world a friendly place. There is always hope. There is always the possibility of coming to terms with harm done to us or of addressing the harms we cause. There is redemption.

That’s a message full of wonder. Christmas celebrations often awaken in us a sense of wonder. There is the wonder of lights, of colour, and of beauty in the world around us. Jesus helps us see the gift of beauty of the world he has created. As a song puts it: "Heaven above is softer blue, / Earth around is sweeter green. Something lives in every hue / Christless eyes have never seen."

Winnipeg singer Steve Bell sings a song titled Why Do We Hunger For Beauty? It captures the idea that within us there is something that responds to true beauty with the sense that behind it stands the presence of God. It is not unlike the physicist who searches for that elegant equation that will unlock the secrets of the universe. The birth of Jesus evokes that sense of wonder. The countless carols, the marvellous oratorios or dramas such as A Christmas Carol testify to the wonder of a single birth.

Author Phil Yancey, in his book Soul Survivor, takes a cue from author and philosopher G.K. Chesterton in trying to come to terms with God amid the joys and sorrows of life.

"For me," Yancey writes, "the riddles of God proved more satisfying than the answers proposed without God. I too came to believe in the good things of this world, first revealed to me in music, romantic love, and nature, as relics of a wreck, and as bright clues into the nature of a reality shrouded in darkness."

At his inauguration, Pope Benedict XVI described our world as a kind of ocean of "salt waters of suffering and death," a "sea of darkness without light." "The net of the gospel," however, he argued, "pulls us out of the waters of death and brings us into the splendor of God’s light." He explained the contrast in an image that fits marvellously with the story of the birth of Jesus.

Jesus’ birth illustrates God’s "patience" that leads to life and redemption. Leaders by "impatience" bring destruction and death. "God, who became a lamb, tell us that the world is saved by the Crucified One, not by those who crucified him," said Benedict.

Political leaders, many of whom were sitting in front of Benedict as he delivered his homily, were urged to see their role as shepherds who truly care for their people and give themselves for their protection and wellbeing, who act "patiently."

But how easily we choose the impatient way. When we ignore the corrosive effects of what our cultural enterprises produce, when we consider only our advantage in trade talks, when we refuse to consider the costs of what our way of life does to the environment, when we conduct our politics as if some ideology captures all the truth, when we go to war to protect our access to oil or to prove we are strong, what are these but reflections of the "salt waters of impatience" that our world so easily produces?

Benedict XVI said,

"Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is. We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ."

That’s why for Christians, Christmas represents a powerful reminder that we do live in a friendly universe. Despite all the struggle and sorrow this world can bring ultimately we are in God’s hands, protected by Him, visited by Him and secure in Him.

My grandmother was someone who experienced that as a powerful reality. She too lived under Stalin. Her letters tell her story. A widow during those years, she writes in an early 1930s letter that if Jesus Christ appeared bodily before her she would take hold of his feet and remind him of his promise to take care of widows and orphans. During the ‘30s, four of her five sons in Russia, a son-in-law and two daughters-in-law were taken away. Only one survived; the rest were executed or starved to death.

Yet, at the end of her life she was at peace, grateful for the children who had been rescued from death and secure in the sense that she could entrust all her grief to God.

As we reflect again on Christmas, we will be reminded that despite all the grief human impatience and avarice visits on our world, there is a spirit that transforms it into a friendly world. It may take special focus to see. But it’s there. Jesus has brought it.

This article first appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press.