Love

"The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end"" (Luke 1:30-33).

I was reminded this past Sunday that love can be incredibly inconvenient. Our Nativity pageant was told from the perspective of the innkeeper and his wife: imagine their ire when all these people kept showing up at their inn! They'd had a hard day's work, but here they all came, insistent, untimely, demanding. No wonder the innkeeper was perturbed! 

Love can be inconvenient. It comes -- and is demanded of us -- at times we weren't expecting. It is messy. It is entangled. It can be brutally heartbreaking. Love makes great demands on us. Nowhere are we reminded of this more than in the reality of God becoming flesh.

God chooses a confused virgin as the dwelling place for the Son as He grows within her. It's more than a little inconvenient.

Our God is born in a stable to a mother accompanied by no midwife to help her give birth. It's more than a little messy.

Jesus has a human mother, married to a husband who raises the child as his own, and a Father in heaven, which prompts him to disappear for a few days in the Jerusalem temple, leaving everyone else terrified. It's more than a little entangled.

Jesus' dedication in the temple is accompanied by Simeon's prophesy to Mary that "a sword will pierce your own soul also" (Lk 2:35). Her son, whom she loves, will leave his family to travel around preaching the good news. He will be both wildly popular and popularly reviled. He will die, horribly, on the Cross. It's more than a little heartbreaking.

Yet Mary "treasured all these things in her heart" (Lk 2:51).

For love of their son, Mary and Joseph became a refugee family as they fled to Egypt to save his life. Mary meets her son carrying his own cross, and watches him fall. She receives his body, and sees it lying in the tomb.

Sorrow and love and mystery, all bound up together. Most of us won't have to face the staggering loss that came with Mary's love. But we all know, from our own lives, that saying yes to love is bound up with messiness, with pain, and with inconvenience alongside the joy. Love fulfills our deepest human needs, but no one ever said it was easy.

Our longing for God is bound up with inconvenience. We are called upon to say yes to God in ways that aren't always easy. God comes into our lives in unexpected ways, sometimes in ways we don't enjoy. We are asked to step out of our comfort zone, to do things we don't want to do. This is what loving God entails.

God's love for us comes in the glorious manifestation of His promise, the Incarnation and final coming of Christ. Christ the King, Christ the infant. They are the same. Love in all its messiness is tied to love in its glory. We are preparing to celebrate God's coming into the world. Through it all, the thing that matters most is our own willingness to love and be loved, to embrace love in all its fullness and complexity. 

"And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing [...] And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love" (1 Corinthians 13:2-3, 13).