Christmas grace works for the vulnerable

Moderator, Dr John Kirkpatrick, reflects on how we should embrace vulnerability to read the Christmas story in a fresh way.

As soon as you enter the hospital for some investigation or care, there is a feeling of vulnerability. The sense of control on the outside evaporates on coming through the doors. Everything you might think you are on the outside may feel very irrelevant. This continues as you are helped through the process of admission. You may finally then have to change out of your clothes, those familiar and chosen things, to a hospital gown.

This is an experience I can identify with, and must say I was very thankful for the opportunity to receive the help of the skills and care of wonderful people. The memory of vulnerability still remains, perhaps best symbolised in the flimsy disposable gown.

Our sense of vulnerability is really minimal in comparison to that experienced by many of the key characters in the Advent narratives. Think with me for a moment of the account of Mary and Joseph, preceded by that of Elizabeth and Zechariah, and finally of Jesus the infant.

Luke’s gospel account introduces us to Elizabeth and Zechariah, parents of John the Baptist. Two older people and Elizabeth unable to bear children

(Luke 1:7). In his regular service in the temple, Zechariah having been chosen by lot, enters the quiet and stillness of the temple to burn incense. Here he is confronted by the angel Gabriel and given both promise and instruction: “Your prayer has been heard and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son” (Luke 1:13). Please read the whole account… but for now we can sense the fear, the confusion and the rising questions… answered prayers… a whole new season of uncharted life. In the end we know that it was an amazing miracle but it called for two older people to open their lives and allow a very new and strange set of circumstances to take control.

For the “hopes and fears of all the years” to be met in him, it required…this vulnerable death.

This sense of vulnerability is greatly heightened in the situation of Mary and Joseph. The teenager Mary, faced with the prospect of an agreed and anticipated marriage to Joseph, is interrupted by the visitation of the angel Gabriel. She is asked to let go of her security in the plans already made and to trust in the promises of God; to cast herself fully into the care of the Lord. We are not given to know the inner thoughts, apart from her biological ones, about the means of conceiving, but for her to respond: “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word,” was the embracing of overwhelming vulnerability.

“I feel as if I’m losing all my leaves. The branches and the wind and the rain. I don’t know what’s happening anymore,” is the powerful description of vulnerability by Anthony, played by Anthony Hopkins, in the excellent film Father. A modern-day story of dementia and its effects.

Mary could have said the same, but she with full possession of her mind was able to choose to embrace her vulnerability. Thinking of what this would potentially mean for her gives us some sense of the weight of the choice. Potentially to lose her anticipated future, to give cause for suspicion, even death. Though when considering who made the request and how it occurred, she would have pondered that he who asked this of her would enable her to achieve it.

Joseph, on the other hand, is called to embrace vulnerability of a different kind. Leaving his whole plan for the future in uncertainty too. Matthew records how having considered the honourable way forward and quietly divorce Mary, the angel of the Lord appears to him in a dream assuring him of the true story he is now a part of. Joseph goes ahead and marries, stepping into something that he has no control over and which will ultimately control him in ways that will have eternal consequences and blessings for him.

How can we experience anything of the grace of God at work in our lives unless we too are willing to become vulnerable…

Both Mary and Joseph’s willingness to embrace the vulnerable pale somewhat in the light of God’s choice. It’s not just the fact of God becoming human, though here we should point out the great truth that the 11th century writer Anslem writes about in Cur Deus Homo (Why God became man), since the debt of sin is so great only God could pay it. The child Jesus faced the vulnerability of humanity very evidently in the very first weeks of his life. Herod, in true spirit of the seed of the enemy, sets about to murder him and in so doing murders all the male children in the vicinity of Bethlehem. The poem by Malcolm Guite (see sidebar) poignantly reflects on this.

It was when having some tests done, dressed in the blue flimsy gown and now in the technical space surrounded by various medical professionals that something occurred… it began by feeling very cold and then a sense of falling, of drifting away, hearing voices in the distance but unable to make sense... fainting. This produced a helplessness and another level of the vulnerable, but all in the safe environment of the skilled team.

Yet when the Christ child was led up the mount at Golgotha bearing his, or should we not say our cross, he was then led to the place of ultimate vulnerability – where naked upon the crude and brutal weapon of torture, he was laid bare to our judgment. And yet it has to be or there is no hope in any Advent. For the “hopes and fears of all the years” to be met in him, it required this death, this vulnerable death.

And so to us. How can we experience anything of the grace of God at work in our lives unless we too are willing to become vulnerable, to have our hearts laid bare and to come into the light of truth? Jesus became the vulnerable, so that he might win for us a safe place to be vulnerable and a secure place for all the vulnerable.

Perhaps this Advent season I can set a challenge for us – to read again the Advent accounts and observe prayerfully this vulnerable theme and seek to hear the Lord both encourage and comfort, challenge and invite us out of the shadows to meet him in the light of the Christmas glory of his Son.