Into Newness
“Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”
It’s recently been brought to my attention how significant the closeness of the observed holiday of Christ’s birth (Christmas) and the end of the calendar year (observed by New Year’s Eve) are to one another. This may be by sheer happenstance, but I’d like to think otherwise.
In order to see the significance of the two, you must understand what we just celebrated. God incarnate, Jesus Christ came to throw a wrench in the cogs of strife and hatred, of war and death, of empire and nationalism, showing that there are new and better ways of living. The plight of mankind’s sinful heart can have an alternate ending written: one with peace, righteousness, love, and hope.
Isaiah pointed to this when he waxed poetically, “He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” (Isaiah 2:4)
These power systems, not just of war but of busyness, wealth, discrimination, party allegiance, and sexual exploitation, meet their match in the Son of God and man, Jesus Christ.
“Power from God’s love breaks the vicious cycles. We have seen them broken in Jesus, and occasionally we have seen them broken in our own lives. It is promised that the cycles can be broken, disarmament will happen, and life can be different. It is promised and it is coming, in God’s good time”
“Imagine a whole company of believers rethinking their lives redeploying their energy, reassessing their purposes. The path is to love God, not party, not ideology, not pet project, but God’s will for steadfast love that is not deterred by fear and anxiety. The path is to love neighbor, to love neighbor face-to-face, to love neighbor in community action, to love neighbor in stymie arrangements, in imaginative policies.”
Preparing for tomorrow, we know that New Year’s Eve is marked with parties and celebration as we turn a page of time together. It is also marked with resolutions. “I want to go to the gym more,” “I am going to start saving more than spending,” “I am going to go back to college,”
I want to do something new that I've never done before.
These resolutions make their way into declarations and it is up to us (and those we include for accountability sake) to see them through. There is a newness in the air. Gone are the old days of 2017; 2018 has just arrived and it’s just taken its coat off at the door, ready to be welcomed in.
And so, the correlation I see that is so significant between our observation of the birth of Jesus and the emerging new year is that Christ allows us to step into something new--a new reality. Imagine what Isaiah was prophesying was for 2018: weapons of warfare being broken down and assembled back together as cake mixers; missiles being boiled down into Little League baseball bats; chemical gases being used to promote agricultural growth for starving families.
This imaginative dream started seeing blueprints drawn up, measurements being taken, and services being rendered when Mary gave birth to her firstborn. This hope-of-the-world infant grew into the God-man, Jesus the Christ, and brought about a revolutionary way of seeing the world. And he asks us to join along and see with different eyes.
New eyes.
