Everything About Jesus Saves Us

I came out to my car last week and drove to Detroit in silence (about 35 minutes) until I reached the outskirts of Motown.

When I turned on the radio the dial had been changed to an all-Christmas format, which is really not my “thing” until well into Advent.

I knew immediately who’d changed the channel: my daughter, Juliana. She’d put the same station on a few days earlier to loud protests from her decade-older brother Harrison (who knows it’s not quite Tanner-appropriate to listen to Christmas music two weeks before Thanksgiving).

Still, I smiled when I heard it and left the music playing in my car all day. Juliana had said the songs brought her “joy” and something like her feeling came over me.

What brings such joy (for her and for me) is the knowledge that God was already at work saving us when he took on DNA, fingerprints, eyelashes, and a measurable blood pressure in Jesus.

The infant’s helplessness and vulnerability saves us. As Mary teaches the toddler God to speak, the act of restoration is already at work by this one named Jesus who decades later preaches his Great Sermon that flips all religious aspiration on its head, and who teaches us to pray, using words (like “Abba”) he learned from mom.

We are being redeemed by the sawdust under his nails as Jesus the adolescent labors in the wood shop of Joseph, building furniture as a human with the same creative eye with which he furnished the heavens and earth.

When he walks on water, he treads the waves to save us. He draws in the sand and sleeps on a boat to deliver us from evil.

The tears of Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus are as essential to our redemption as the command to “come forth” from the grave. The tears are the tears of God and the voice of resurrection life is a human voice and the glorious gospel is that it all works to restore us.

He starves himself in the desert that we might eat from the Tree of Life. He turns water into Cabernet that we might no longer taste death but an eternal wedding feast.

Incarnate Love—Jesus—is the great work of reconciliation from conception to ascension—and beyond—by the Spirit of the Father.

Though we are right to elevate the Cross and the blood, the lashes and the crown and the nails that deliver us, “the great joy” announced by the Angels is that there is a moment in the shared life of the eternal God and a point in human history when extreme humility inaugurates a New Heaven and a New Earth and a New Humanity at Bethlehem, little among the clans of Judah.

Painting by Cindy McKenna (via Brian Zahnd).