Tyler Johnson, MDiv
Tyler is a pastor and a former NASA engineer. He loves to explore truth through God’s word and God’s works. He lives in Iowa with his wife and four children and spends what little free-time he has pondering the mysteries of light
One of the big themes of the Advent (Christmas) season is hope. Hope is a tricky thing though, because hope is not something that grows strong when we are living lives of comfort, convenience and control. When everything is going well, or even just okay, we have little motivation to hope for something greater. Instead hope grows strong in the petri dish of frustration and futility, disappointment and despair. Hope makes the most sense when the current reality doesn’t make any.
Some of you out there may be living in that petri dish right now. Maybe you’ve lost your job, or lost a loved one. Maybe your world has been turned upside down by this COVID pandemic and you see no way forward. Maybe your eyes have been opened to a slew of systemic problems in the world and it seems that the people who have the power to make meaningful changes are more concerned with greasing the wheels that keep them in control than actually doing right by the people they serve. We have good reason to be disappointed with the world we live in.
These are all what we could call examples of ‘special despair,’ meaning that they are only true for certain people under certain circumstances. Scientifically special cases are interesting to study, but much more helpful is the ‘general’ case. The general case is the most broadly construed case that affects as many people as possible in the same way. So allow me, if you will, a moment to generalize the petri dish we live in.
The planet we inhabit won’t sustain life forever. This is true regardless of the effects of climate change, because eventually our sun will die. Sure that will likely be billions of years from now, but it is inevitable nonetheless. When it dies it will probably become a red giant that will swell to such an enormous size that it will encompass Earth’s orbit. So Earth will become subsumed by its dying sun.
That’s a long time away, though, and it is possible that humanity will be able to escape Earth and our solar system and find a new home elsewhere. Even if this happens it too will be temporary. Sure all stars eventually burn out, but it’s even more futile than that. The universe is not eternal. The best cosmological models all show that the universe will one day end. There are two ways this could happen. The first happens if gravity wins and eventually reverses the expansion of the universe so that all things start moving back towards one another. In this model the universe ends in a Big Crunch which seems to be something like an infinitely dense massive black hole. The second option is that gravity ultimately loses to the universe’s expansion and it just keeps spreading out. In this model all the stars die, all the planets fall apart, and the whole universe becomes a uniform blob of low temperature nothingness. Either way the future of the universe is nothing but death and futility.
There it is. That’s the general case for despair. That is the universal petri dish that we exist in. Everything ends. All life dies. All purpose becomes pointless. Merry Christmas!
And I don’t mean that facetiously. Seriously, Merry Christmas!
See, the only thing that could offer any kind of hope in a universe such as ours would have to be something from outside the universe. It would require that something outside our universe take an interest in our universe and intercede somehow. It would require something that wasn’t bound by the trajectory of death and futility that marks our universe. And that is precisely what we celebrate at Christmas.
The Incarnation is God, the Creator, breaking into the world He created and becoming a part of it. It is the greatest paradox of them all. It would be like me imagining a whole world of people and places and things full of color and details and stories and emotions. And then while still holding that world in my imagination, also entering that world and becoming a part of it. It makes no sense. Neither does the Incarnation.
But it happened. Christmas can’t be cancelled because the past can’t be changed. God, the Creator, entered our world and became a part of it. And if that can happen, then anything is possible. And that is the root of the hope that we find at Christmas. A hope so strong that not even a futile universe of death can quell its power.
So whatever you’re going through right now, remember the Incarnation. Remember that the Creator of this universe loved it (and you) so much that he humbled Himself and entered our world of frustration, futility, desperation and disappointment. He became a part of our world, so that he could raise it up and create a path for it to become part of His. That is the root of all our hope.