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Reflection for December 18 2005

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Last week we spoke of how often prophets expect God to arrive from above amid special effects like thunder and earthquake. But may he not come more effectively in quiet ways out of lowly places like Bethlehem, to come not so much from above but from below, from within the womb of a virgin and even from deep within us? We referred to Ebenezer Scrooge as an example. Remember how it was Marley's ghost, dragging his chains from the cellar below right up to Scrooge's top floor room that alerted him to the fact that profit wasn't everything? Remember how when Scrooge said Marley had been a good man of business, Marley cried, "Mankind was my business"? And this launched Scrooge upon a journey amid the lowliest of people to release within himself a fountain of grace that would rejuvenate him, make of him a truly human being.

That's an example of how God often comes to us from below, from our conscience deep within us - sometimes to shake us up! But Dickens' biblically influenced stories offer us another such example of God's coming to us from below (or deep within us) not simply as conscience, but as the purest of gratuitous love aimed right at you as a person. It's in the story Great Expectations where the hero Pip has been born poor and then some unknown benefactor comes along to provide him with an education which triggers in Pip egocentric, snobbish expectations of breaking into high society.

And then, one stormy night, he hears a footstep on the staircase below his top floor apartment. (Here comes God again!) Pip steps out onto the landing and calls down, "Is someone there?" A voice answers, "Yes." "What floor do you want?" asks Pip. "The top . . . Mr. Pip." (There's something suddenly personal in that, isn't there? Our God is a personal God. He knows us by name.) The figure comes within the light of Pip's lamp and Pip reacts: "I saw with a stupid kind of amazement that he was holding out both his hands to me." (Our God is a God ever ready to embrace.) Then Pip says reluctantly, "Do you wish to come in?" "Yes, I wish to come in." ("Behold," says Christ, "I stand at the door of your inner sanctum and knock.")

Then Pip recognizes his visitor as the escaped convict he had helped long ago as a boy to obtain food and drink out on the marshes near his village and learns that it was this convict, returned from many years of prosperity down under - in Australia, who has been Pip's benefactor all along. "He came to where I stood (even as Christ once entered another upper room) and held out both his hands . . .. Not knowing what to do (writes Pip), . . . I reluctantly gave him my hands. He grasped them . . . and raised them to his lips, kissed them." And then, while holding Pip's hands, his visitor says, "You acted noble, my boy . . . . Noble Pip, - and I have never forgot it . . . . I'm your second father."

God comes from deep within us to revive within us the nobility with which he has endowed us from all eternity - and whatever we have done that has been truly noble, (and there's been a lot that we tend to overlook) HE remembers and will cultivate that nobility until we are unmistakably his children. And now to save his old benefactor from execution for having returned from exile to England, Pip gives up his prior expectations and status to risk his life for his friend. He revives the benevolence he displayed toward that convict as a boy - but this time not out of fear but genuinely, with conviction.

So THIS is what we have to be alert to as Christmas approaches. We may plead for divine interventions loaded with special effects such as the prophets call for. But wouldn't it be better to look rather within ourselves, to catch the sound of a footstep on the stair, the ascent of our God from some inner Bethlehem, a God who loves YOU personally and whose only Christmas wish is that you realize your divine nobility?

-- Geoff Wood