Every Load

Did you ever have to stick up for someone taunted by a bully? This happens. A bystander is not personally in the vulnerable spot of being picked on, but seeing someone else in a predicament, he or she jumps on to the side of the one suffering abuse. It is a way of taking up the company with the lowly to protect them from hostile attack. I remember several occasions where I should have jumped in, as a school mate, but only two occasions when I did. One word for it is solidarity. Think of the time in which you, by an act of your will, shouldered the burden of someone, when it was not naturally your burden to share.

Hymns extoling Christ as the one in solidarity with us, sharing the load for our sake, are part of our Christmas singing. How good it is now for us to focus on one such beautiful hymns (Hymn 102). Imagine you are sitting in the softly lit church. The prelude sequence of beautiful carols and anthems has just concluded. There is a pause, then a beautiful solo soprano pierces the quiet: “Once in royal David’s city stood a lowly cattle shed, where a mother laid her baby in a manger for his bed…” Chill bumps!  With the last phrase the verse, “Mary was that mother mild, Jesus Christ her little child”, still hanging in the quiet space of the church, the choir, in harmony, joins in and the procession commences. This is not an unusual way to start a Christmas service in the Anglican tradition.

This is a hymn in which the text artfully lifts the theology of the Incarnation as the saving way God redeemed us by taking up our human nature fully, The Second Person of the Trinity, fully God, of course, assumes our nature fully, so that all we are is healed. God, stands with us against the bullying assault of death, sin and misery. Born not in a palace, but in a lowly cattle shed, baby Jesus, squirms, wets, cries, blinks and spits up, just like you did as a newborn. God undertakes the fullness of the human experience.

He came down to earth from heaven, who is God and Lord of all,
and his shelter was a stable, and his cradle was a stall;
with the poor, the scorned the lowly lived on earth our Savior holy.

The early church thinkers, many of them fourth century bishops argued robustly at the early ecumenical Councils of the church in Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon in order to agree and state that Jesus did share with you, all that it is to be human including having a complete human body, nature and mind. Have you ever suffered physically? So has God. Have you been treated unjustly, or been slighted, chided, disregarded? So has God. The bishops and other theologians, women and men, of those early centuries, upheld that God was not merely appearing to be human, he was fully human, even with his full divinity. Neither the fully divine nor the fully human nature was compromised, in the mystery of the Incarnation.

We will not get stuck on Charles Wesley’s phrase in Hark! The herald angels sing, “Veiled in flesh” as though God was just wearing a garment of flesh to appear human. The rest of the line is “the Godhead see: hail the incarnate Deity Pleased as man with us to dwell; Jesus our Emmanuel!” He was human even as he was God. Neither are we stuck in another favorite of Christmastide hymn,  O come all ye faithful”. In the last verse is the phrase, “Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing.” This is not to promote that the divinity of Christ only appeared to be human. It is promoting that the Word appeared, and in that emergence of the Eternal Word, actual flesh was assumed, and the fullness of human existence, indeed the whole material order, was taken up into healing redemption.

All that you are was accepted and born by Christ. Arguing that point, St. Gregory, Bishop of Nazianzus in the late fourth century asserted, “That which is not assumed is not healed”, just as St. Athanasius of Alexandria, years earlier had said “That which is not assumed is not redeemed.” We sing now with joy, all that we are was assumed by Jesus, the Logos of God, so all that we are has been healed and redeemed. Look how our hymn sings of it; read now every word of verses three and four:

We, like Mary, rest confounded that a stable would display
heaven’s Word, the world’s creator, cradled there on Christmas Day,
yet this child, our Lord and brother, brought us love for one another.

For he is our lifelong pattern; daily when on hearth he grew,
he was tempted, scorned, rejected, tears and smiles like us he knew.
Thus, he feels for all our sadness, and he shares in all our gladness.

Is it not astounding and comforting that God in Christ knew tears and smiles, just as you do?  God feels for all your sadness and shares in all your gladness. I want to put alongside these a verse from another beautiful hymn, Lo, how a Rose e’re blooming, (Hymn 81) makes the same point, it the final verse. The hymn speaks of Christ metaphorically as the bloom:

O Flower whose fragrance tender with sweetness fills the air,
dispel in glorious splendor the darkness everywhere;
true man, yet very God, from sin and death now save us,
and share our every load.

Every load you have is shared by the God of the Universe. God knows everything you endure, because Jesus, is acquainted with all your ways, all your emotions, all your experiences. Our suffering, our fears and death itself is really more than we can bear. God was born of Mary; not wanting you bullied by things so overpowering for you God took on life in the created realm. In the end he will take us to the place where he is gone; we shall see him “not in that poor lowly stable, with the oxen standing round…but in heaven, where his saints his throne surround; Christ revealed to faithful eye, set at God’s right hand on high.