My body has been doing a lot of weird things lately. For example, as I type these words, my arms feel like they are on fire. Last night I had tremors for six hours. When I read my books for homework, my eyesight blurs and sometimes even blacks out or goes blind. My face goes numb about every three days. My legs feel like lead. My ears sometimes feel like they are plugged into two electric outlets, with currents crisscrossing my head and zapping my brain. Occasionally I am entirely paralyzed. At least once every day I get the distinct impression that tiny bugs are crawling all over my body —- under my skin. And that is just the start.
The doctors say I have symptoms of multiple sclerosis. This degenerative condition will remain with me for the rest of my life.
Sounds like another degenerative condition that lasts for a lifetime: sin.
It affects even the best of us. It destroys our hearts and bodies. It makes us want to destroy others. For example, my friend dreamed Sunday night that one of her professors was a murderer. She watched in stupefied horror while he shot her best friend in the chest. The sight of blood made her wake up.
Sin gives us nightmares that are false. Unfortunately, it also gives us nightmares that are true, like pre-Thanksgiving breakups that leave us raw during the “All I Want for Christmas Is You, Baby” season. Like grandfathers who die of prostate cancer, and like three-year-old kids who die in tragic accidents. Like war. And M.S.
The Advent message at church this week highlighted sin. People seemed depressed afterwards. They complained that we needed “a little more redemption” in the sermon.
But we who are Christians forget that for almost 4,000 years of human history, mankind knew nothing of Emmanuel. Sure, prophets proclaimed bits and pieces of the redemption narrative. There was a hope for Messiah. But we lived in the painful reality of an incurable degenerative condition that ravished the nations and debilitated the chosen people.
So let’s not jump ahead and claim the healing without sitting awhile in the immensity of our predicament.
Otherwise we will follow the footsteps of wise men who became stupid by trying to outpace God. Take Abraham, for example, who took God’s promise to give him a son so seriously that he took matters into his own hands and helped fulfill the promise. Or Jacob, whose mother told him a thousand times that God had promised he would rule his brother, and so contrived to get the blessing.
When we try to put the Savior before the suffocation of sin, we become like the prodigal son who thought his dad existed in order to make his own life better.
We think so poorly of the prodigal son who takes his father’s money and wastes it on a lifestyle of self-fulfillment. Yet he only claimed what belonged to him: his portion of the inheritance. Maybe we should blame the father for being so lavish, so prodigal, with his funds by allowing the boy to take it before the proper time. The father’s kindness made allowance for the son’s disrespect and gave him the opportunity to choose the inheritance when he should have stayed with his father. It was that same kindness that later motivated the son to return to his father, even if he might lose his identity as his son.
Only when we “come to our senses” can we escape sin’s mediocrity; it’s sort of sleep of many dreams. Only when we recognize that a safe savior is a nightmare can we abandon our desire for an Advent on our terms.
Emmanuel redefines what broken hearts and broken bodies mean. His incarnation invaded flesh to demonstrate the enormity of our suffering -— and redeem it.
