Jesus Comes in the Unexpected

More than 2000 years ago, a couple was getting ready to marry and start their life together. Were they madly in love? Were they neighbors who had grown up together and everyone assumed would end up as a couple? Was it an arranged marriage between two people who hardly knew each other? We will never know the details, but we will know them far better than most of the billions of other couples who have married before and since.

As devout Jews living in poverty in a country under foreign occupation, they had heard the stories of the oppression of their people countless times. They had also heard the sacred readings from the prophets who kept calling the people back to fidelity and promising them that a savior would come to rescue them. They could never have imagined what these words would soon mean to them personally and to the world.

Mary and Joseph were about to embark on an unimaginable and unforeseen journey of faith. Now every year since the lifetime of their most extraordinary son, Christians everywhere are invited to recall and renew their own journey of faith in the season of Advent. On one level, Advent is about getting ready to celebrate Christmas, when we commemorate the coming of Jesus as a human person among us. More deeply, it is not about recalling something that happened long ago and far away. It is about recalling that Jesus comes again among us in the human form of all his brothers and sisters, very near to us every day.

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The end of a calendar year feels like a natural time to reflect on the year that is ending and how we have lived in it. The parents of Jesus certainly would not have made any accurate predictions about how the year in which they were to marry would unfold. None of us can know all that will happen to us in any given year. For many, the last couple of years have been particularly unpredictable. There were the big things that turned many people’s lives completely upside down: pandemics, natural disasters, war and displacement. For any one of us, there were also the personal disruptions: changes in jobs or finances, deaths of loved ones, serious illness, failed relationships. There are even disruptions of a positive kind: a birth, marriage, financial gain, new relationship, good news of any kind.

All of these things bring changes in us and, if we are people of faith, they bring some changes in the way we relate to God as well. Everything that has happened influences how we believe and pray. With each new event, there will be feelings towards God such as gratitude or resentment or abandonment. God comes to us through our experiences and through other people. Each of these is a new birth, a new appearance of the divine coming to earth. Advent gives us an opportunity to ponder our journey, to think and pray about what has unfolded, how God has been revealed to us.

At the same time, it is a season of looking forward. Once Mary and Joseph accepted in faith the call that they had received, they still had no idea what it would mean or how it would continue to be revealed in each new day. They walked in faith through every day of preparation for the birth of their child. Then they were called to walk to another city, to give birth in an unknown and unexpected place, separate from all their familiar comforts. Each of us is called to face Advent in this same way of faith, as we wait for Jesus to be born again in us in unfamiliar and unknown ways.