I thought God would be more pushy.
I was blessed to make it through the entire Bible this year (with many missed days and many catch-up days), and the contrast in God way of relating to his people struck me. We go from fire and thunder in Exodus to the whisper of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of the first Christians.
Perhaps it was more than a whisper — in Acts there are healings and miracles, rooms shaken with the wind of the Holy Spirit, people clearly moved by the will of God. Before that was the dynamic preaching and incredible healings of Christ, leading to his death with earthquakes and darkened sun and the greatest miracle of the Resurrection.
But before that? Nazareth.
I’m fascinated by Nazareth. Thirty years of Jesus’s life are practically unmentioned in Scripture, beyond a few events like the Flight to Egypt and the Finding in the Temple. Sometimes, I think one of the most important keys to the Christian life is hidden in those thirty years.
Think about it. Thousands of people encountered Jesus during his three-year public ministry. We hear of many of them healed or called away from sin, or called to a specific ministry like the Apostles and disciples. But after that encounter…what happened? Daily life. A changed daily life, yes, but daily life. Not all the early Christians were living like St. Paul. Not all the saints founded religious orders or worked miracles. Most of them lived quite ordinary lives — but in an extraordinary way.
I was talking about this with some good friends recently, how some Christians have incredible conversions stories, while for many of us, we’re wrestling with the same sins for years in our ordinary lives. I know for me personally, and I suspect for other people, we dislike that slow progress and ordinary life. We’re waiting for the big turnaround moment in our lives. We’re waiting for the equivalent of Jesus stepping into our fishing boat and telling us to leave everything and follow him. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if that would just happen already? Then we can stop stumbling around in the ordinary and become Christians set on fire for God.
But it struck me that what we’re waiting for has already happened.
Hasn’t Christ already knocked on the door of every Christian’s heart? And that is why we are Christian, and why we continue to be Christians?
Maybe he doesn’t get into our boat physically. But he still knocks on our hearts a thousand times a day. It’s just a knock, most often. Not knocking us off our chariots with a blaze of light and a question about why we’re persecuting him. It’s soft, but firm. We can turn him away without losing our eyesight — at least physically.
I’ve realized I’ve ignored that knock a thousand more times than I’ve listened to it. I realize, too, that my life would not be any different today if Jesus physically showed up on my doorstep or walked down my street like he did for those in Galilee.
What would be different? What would he say that I haven’t already heard in Scripture? What would he ask that I haven’t already heard him ask in prayer or through his Church? Would sitting at his feet really be that different than kneeling in the adoration chapel before him, concealed beneath the appearance of bread? He’s the same Christ, present almost exactly the same way. Would looking him in the eye really convict me more than gazing at the Host and marveling that God would be there just for me? My heart knows — it knows in a way beyond how my head can know and my eyes can see and my emotions can feel — that he’s there. And what changes?
God isn’t pushy.
Perhaps we’d be afraid of him if he were pushy, and that’s why he isn’t; he wants us to love him, not fear him. So he comes as a Child or in a little white wafer.
But — and I wonder if he knows this? — that leaves the possibility for us not to notice him. It’s so easy to ignore a child or a little white wafer. You can ignore a thousand other whisperings of his love if you try. Honestly, it doesn’t take that much effort, even if after a while you feel like you’re living without air.
I don’t understand why, and perhaps this is just the way he has chosen to call my heart at this point in my life, but God is a hidden God. A quiet God. He’s so obvious we can go without noticing him, like the clean windows we look out of or the air we breathe. He’s a God who lives in our ordinary lives the way we live with spouses and parents and siblings and roommates.
If we are not attentive to them, who we see, how can we be attentive to a loving God closer than our innermost selves?
What he wouldn’t do for a glance, just but a glance of our hearts to his! A look of the soul that says I love you, I am listening, you are welcome, Lord, in this stable of my heart.
I think that is why Advent and Christmas cut my heart more deeply than Lent and Easter. God becomes so little at Christmas that we can ignore him and hurt him — and he does it so we will love him. He becomes little enough to slip into every crack of our lives… if we let him. If we clear out our distractions and preoccupations with the big and the exciting and the lives that aren’t ours. If we let little Annunciations and Incarnations and Via Dolorosas and Resurrections become the rhythm of life in our Nazareths.
Perhaps that is part of what holiness is — a heart ever watchful for Christ, ever attentive to him at every hour, so we can say our fiat when the big mission comes, if it does. Perhaps our big missions are made up of a thousand little steps weaving together to create a masterpiece, and we never get to see the end product until heaven.
And I wonder, too, especially for myself — if I cannot give him my heart fully on earth, how can I give it to him fully in heaven? If I ignore God on earth, sometimes willingly, will heaven really be heaven for me?
Emmanuel is with us — but do we notice him?
Today’s O Antiphon addresses Christ as Clavis David — Key of David. “O Key of David, and scepter of the house of Israel, who opens and no man shuts, who shuts and no man opens: come, and lead forth the captive who sits in the shadows from his prison.”
May Christ open our hearts this Christmas, for our growing awareness and love of him is nothing but a work of his grace and our response. May a slow miracle begin to dawn in our hearts this Christmas as we see Emmanuel every day, every hour, every moment.
O come, thou Key of David, come,
And open wide our heavenly home;
Make safe the way that leads on high,
And close the path to misery.
Pax Christi,
K.M. Small