Christmas is the Triumph of Weakness

Christmas is the triumph of weakness, or, more accurately, it is the triumph of vulnerability.

A happy 12th Day of Christmas, friends. Today the church marks the end of Christmastide and it represents a final chance to reflect on its meaning. What should we most remember from Matthew and Luke’s nativity tales

Among other things, I suggest we should remember that God chooses to disclose his redemptive purposes through the things that our culture perceives as irredeemably weak.

Our culture prizes unqualified strength above all. Politicians ought never to admit failure in public. Pastors ought always to be overcomers from the pulpit. Athletes are to dig deep, CEOs to project a winning mentality, and scholars to be right.

Mental health struggles? Don’t admit them. A failure of character? Stall as long as possible. A crybaby? God forbid. Signs of aging? For shame’s sake, hide it. A botched moment of parenting? Not worth conceding.

Why? Because somebody might take advantage of your vulnerability, and the risk is never worth it.

But that is not the way of our Lord. Our Lord chooses to empathize with our weaknesses and, in the Incarnation, risks vulnerability so that we too might choose it and thereby discover life inexhaustible.

The Omnipotent God becomes a powerless child. The King of Heaven holds court in a manger. The One who fills heaven and earth shrinks to the “length of a span,” as Charles Wesley describes it.

Mary carries Infinite Weight within the “finite inwardness” of her womb, as Denise Levertov narrates it, and pushes out into the world a child, “needing, like any other, milk and love—but who was God.”

“He knows the heart of all our hurts,” writes Malcolm Guite in his poem, “A Tale of Two Gardens,” “the inside of our sighs.”

So how shall we then live?

We should refuse to see our weaknesses as impediments to God’s grace and, with the Spirit’s help, to lay down the burden of hiding and pretending and choose instead to live vulnerably.

This is the good news of the God of Christmas, the God who chooses the “weak” of our world to reveal and embody his salvific ways.

Our God is a vulnerable God.

Thanks be to God.