Description: a story unfolding
I’ve been thinking a lot about that phrase: Immanuel, God With Us, a name given to Christ long before Mary laid her baby in a feeding trough. God – the infinite, the omniscient and omnipresent, the I Am – made Himself tiny and frail. He became one of us. All of the symbolism of the systems that came before pointed to this: God living as one of us and sacrificing Himself for us.
He wasn’t what we expected. The King of the universe came to a poor family from a notoriously poor town. He came in politically fraught times, to a people oppressed. He wasn’t handsome, powerful, or wealthy. He lived a life of struggle and displacement. He was misunderstood and eventually tortured to death at the behest of the very religious authorities who should have hailed his arrival. His own people didn’t recognize Him.
And yet, those He touched were transformed. The power of heaven flowed through Him, so that even those who touched His clothing in faith were healed. The unrestrained love of God met every person where they were and drew them in. It swept away sin and hurt and suffering and left joy and healing and hope. The willing were never the same.