Scandalous Love

     Read this from Dietrich Bonhoeffer this morning:
        "The Bible is full of the proclamation that the great miracle has happened as an act of God, without any human doing... What happened?  God had seen the misery of the world and had come Himself in order to help.  Now He was there, not as a mighty One, but in the obscurity of humanity, where there is sinfulness, weakness, wretchedness, and misery in the world.  That is where God goes, and there He lets Himself be found by everyone.  And this proclamation moves through the world anew, year after year, and again this year also comes to us...  The world that Christ comes to save is our fallen and lost world.  None other."
     And I might add--none other Savior.  None greater.   None wiser.  None kinder.  None holier.  None more omniscient or omnipotent.  None who can save to the uttermost.  And none with more love.  One of my favorite verses, as Jesus prepared to leave His disciples and head to the cross: "Having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end." (John 13:1)  Loved them--and us--to the end of His mission at Calvary.  Loves us to the end of our lives.  And loves us stretching into eternity where His love will never end.
     But it all began here--at a rude wooden manger.  The road to Calvary beginning at a crib.  The Mighty One come, as Bonhoeffer says, "in the obscurity of humanity, where there is sinfulness, weakness, wretchedness, and misery... and there lets Himself be found by everyone."
     That is where God goes--to Newtown, to gravesides, to homeless shelters, to prisons, to places of addiction and despair and defeat.  And to us... to each of us wherever we may be.
    What a plan for redemption.  The incarnation, Frederick Buechner writes, is "a kind of vast joke whereby the Creator of the ends of the earth comes among us in diapers... Until we too have taken the idea of the God-man seriously enough to be scandalized by it, we have not taken it as seriously as it demands to be taken."
     O Lord, might we be scandalized by Your coming in such an utterly unbecoming, undesirable, uncomfortable manner!  Move us beyond our happy complacency with the Christmas story and give us new eyes to fathom the infinite distant You traveled to enter this dark planet as one of us... yet also fully God.  If we could but glimpse what You did, how much You relinquished, how far You came down to meet us at that manger, we would fall to our knees in stunned and overwhelming gratitude.
     Because all of it--the manger, the angels, the shepherds, the wisemen,  every single part of the story that we all know and cherish--all of it is because of love.  Divine love.  Your love.  Your infinite, indefatigable, astounding love for us.  The love that led inexorably from Bethlehem as a baby to Calvary as a Savior.
     "Having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end."
     We'll never reach the end of Your love.
      Thank You, Lord Jesus.  Might we respond to Your scandalous love with grateful, trusting hearts.  To God be the glory.