Face to Face: and the Gift of Grace

There is something within us that is intrigued with the notion of putting together things that seem impossible to exist together. Whether it is in literature, with valuable insight promoted through fiction, or an occurrence in human experience or witnessed in nature, we take notice.

We have a fascination with two different worlds coming together. Rudyard Kipling’s series of stories that came to be called The Jungle Book, brings up important archetypal lessons on law and freedom, abandonment, and fostering. It opens compellingly with a frail and helpless “man-cub” coming into the care of a pack of wolves. Then, there is the myth of Cupid and Psyche, a tale of unthinkable interchange. That myth gives rise to many stories, some of them are tragedies, Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Tony and Maria. A happier ending is in the French gothic story, Beauty and the Beast. It puts together a hideous monster with a beautiful young woman. Irony plays heavily as the brute power of the beast leaves him desperate nonetheless, given his heartless self-absorption has twisted him into a monstrous form. His helplessness is juxtaposed with the power of the otherwise delicate woman from the village. Belle, through her life, has cultivated loyal and loving care for others.  That is her saving power. The beast is doomed in a curse until frail beauty introduces transformative love.

The interfacing opposites, unexpectedly put together, draw our attention. I saw a photo of a tigress in a Thai zoo nurturing piglets after she lost her own prematurely born cubs. Contributing to this unlikely fostering, she had been nurtured by a pig when very young. It is an odd picture to see piglets snuggled up with a huge tiger. One thinks of Aesop’s fable of the man, Androcles, removing a thorn from the paw of a lion. (Suddenly, I hear the background music, in my head, of Otis Redding singing “Try a Little Tenderness”). I could go on and on, but I see, I already have.

I mean to set the scene for the most powerful interface; known to Christians who contemplate the mystery of the Incarnation. The infinite One from heaven comes in love to heal finite humanity which seems bent on destructiveness. In Christ we see heaven meeting up with earth, grace interfacing with need, love reaching out to fear. Today and Sunday we hold together bookends of a sacred mystery. The life of Christ begins with his conception in Mary’s womb, and that earthly life of Jesus ends with his death on the cross. The Annunciation is Luke’s story of the willingness of Mary when she is visited by the Archangel Gabriel. That high Feast is today, March 25. The death of Jesus is held before us on Sunday, with the reading of Mark’s Passion Gospel.

The Christ event opens within the womb of Mary and closes with Jesus surrendering and breathing his last. Within that life, within Jesus, we see together all God is and all that a human is. Every human being was conceived and born; every person dies. The Word-made-flesh, Jesus, in love and humility, chose to know human birth and death for himself.  God did not dabble in an appearance within the human realm. God kneaded himself within the whole material reality, indeed, with all that it is to be human, beginning to end. The created order is redeemed from the inside out by the life of the Creator coming here to dwell. “And the Word became flesh, and lived among us, and we have seen his glory.” (John 1:14)  It is an impossible pairing, made possible only by the mystery of God’s power of love.

The Annunciation preserved in Luke’s Gospel is an initial picture of that great mysterious pairing. Joseph and Mary each get word from God through the Angel Gabriel. When the angel comes to Mary and greets her, we have the scene of the messenger of heaven facing the representative of earth. Bishop John V. Taylor treated this subject in his lectures at the University of Birmingham in Central England. These lectures were compiled in his book, The Go-Between God, 1972. He compellingly addresses what is going on in The Annunciation and its implications for us all in how God interfaces with each of us in life.

Taylor associates verses from John Donne’s Extasie with the meeting of heaven and earth taking place through Mary and Gabriel.

Our eye-beames twisted, and did thred
Our eyes, upon one double string;
so to’ entergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the meanes to make us one.

He further emphasizes the wonder of the interlude employing the poetry of Edwin Muir. It is powerful how the poet suggests that an element of the exchange was made in stillness and silence:

See, they have come together, see,
While the destroying minutes flow,
Each reflects the other’s face
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steady there…
But through the endless afternoon
These neither speak nor movement make,
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze would never break.

I hope you are discovering freshly the impossible loving thing God accomplished by choosing to join with us as Christ comes into the world. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man. I hope you see that it means that God is with you. Ordinary you and I are given a relationship with Holy God. I conclude with Taylor’s further sharing of poetry—the same theme of the extraordinary face-to-face— this time, the translated verses of the inimitable German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. Here is his annunciation scene.

The angel’s entrance (you must realize)
was not what made her frightened…
No, not to see him enter, but to find
the youthful angel’s countenance inclined
so near to her; that when he looked, and she
looked up at him, their looks so merged in one
the world outside grew vacant, suddenly,
and all things being seen, endured and done
were crowded into them; just she and he
eye and its pasture, visions ande its view,
here at the point and at this point alone:—
see, this arouses fear. Such fear both knew.