John Fischer The Catch

This, this is Christ the King
Whom shepherds guard and angels sing.
Haste, haste to bring Him laud
The babe, the son of Mary.

Jews still seek their Messiah. If you are ever around a devout orthodox Jew who is truly longing for Messiah, you will be humbled. Their longing can easily eclipse our knowing.

Part of that is because as Gentiles, we have been grafted into the Family Tree. We draw life from all that history, but we don’t fully grasp it. Abraham is not in our DNA. We don’t have the history. We didn’t grow up on the stories – celebrating the remembrances. We don’t really know the depth of that enduring hope. How long, O Lord, how long? We measure everything back 2,000 years when Christ came to earth. Our Jewish brethren have a few thousand years prior to that added onto their calendar. Their calendar keeps on running – their longing, unabated. It’s still B.C..

Another part of this difference, and probably a bigger one, however, is that we are not still seeking. There is this idea that because for us Messiah has come, we don’t need to seek him anymore. He came; He’s here; He’s even in my heart. That implies that I am fully aware of what this means and I have given Him full control of my life. I don’t know about you, but I have a ways to go here.

This is all especially real at Christmastime.

We marvel at the birth; we sing the carols and feel the warm glow of candlelight on Christmas Eve, but do we have a clue who this baby really is, and what He asks of us now? Are we seeking to have Christ all over our life with the same intensity that Jews seek their Messiah? Do we seek Him in all our dealings? Have we given Him scrutiny over every piece of our lives? Are we seeking to know who this is that has saved us, or are we just taking the salvation and going on our way, thank you very much? Are we too flippant or too sentimental over having found the real Messiah?

When the Samaritan woman Jesus met at the well of Jacob encountered the truth that the man she had been talking with was the long-awaited Messiah, she went and got the whole town to come meet Him.  “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” (John 4:29) Either this woman had a great deal of influence in this town, or the longing for Messiah was so great that no one could pass up the possibility that she might be right. What if he was, and they missed it? Unthinkable.

What kind of claim does Christ have on our lives? Quite a bit, I would say. Whatever He wants. Well then, shouldn’t we be about finding that out? Indeed, that would be a great focus to have this season, wouldn’t it? His grace is one thing; His lordship is quite another. This isn’t a little baby we invited into our lives; it is the long-awaited King of Kings and Lord of Lords. What are the implications of that for my life today? Don’t you want to find that out?

Wise men still seek Him. Wise Christians do too.

It had to be God. An angel wouldn’t do. Neither would a prophet, or perhaps an exceptionally great man. Only God Himself could turn the course of where this world was headed. He could have just blown it up and started over, but instead, He decided to get involved, and redirect it from the inside.

If you could create a world and you had the power to create living beings in your image, would you go and be one of them? Would you even think of it? How… why… when… did God come up with this?

“Let us make man in our image,” the scriptures say God said. It’s often used as an indication of the trinity, i.e. God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were chatting one day and one of  them (or maybe all three at the same time) came up with this. I understand this. I talk to myself all the time as if there were at least two of me — one talking, and the other listening. Sometimes they both talk:  “Let’s do the Christmas lights today. No let’s not. We’ll be up all night.” We’ve been known to have long discussions.

I wonder how long it took them to decide to send one of them down here. It’s an unbelievable plan.

“No sweat,” says the Holy Spirit. “I’ll conceive a daughter of Eve, that way we can be the Father, break Adam’s sin curse by not even being a part of his DNA, and then we can pay for all their sins and start a new line — people born of God.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” says Jesus, “You don’t have to go down there and be a baby.”

“You’re forgetting that once you’re done with this and are safely back here with the Father, I’ll be the one who has to live in them — put up with their… whatever they call it.”

“Yes, but we’ll save the race,” says Jesus. “It’s worth it. We will love them completely. We will be one with them the way we are one.”

“Awesome,” says the Spirit.

“It’s brilliant,” says the Father. “It’s the best thing we’ve ever come up with. You’ll understand them completely; you’ll be one of them, for my sake.”

Who could  have thought of this other than God Himself? Where could it have been written down if not the Bible? No other source has the story. That’s because no other source came straight from God, and no one but God could have come up with this.

“I’ve got an idea,” thought God. “Let’s pay them a visit.” And He did.

Our reading today comes by way of my good friend and mentor, David Roper. Besides being a huge fan of Lewis, Chesterton and Donne (sounds like a law firm), he is a student of the scriptures and a poet. I was so touched by this piece that I decided I would share it with you. A retired pastor, David lives in Idaho, ministers to pastors in the north central United States and Canada, and is an avid fisherman, thus his familiarity with the rivers of that region.

The Old Testament hints of the day when God himself would visit the earth. It’s leaves “rustle” with that hope, C. S. Lewis said.

His coming begins with a trickle of truth-the way the Salmon River begins, originating near Stanley as a tiny rivulet that you can easily jump across. It soon grows into a sizable stream as the Stanley Basin tributaries-the Fourth of July Creek, Redfish Creek and others streams-flow into it.

The Salmon flows on, joined by the Yankee Fork and East Fork of the Salmon, the Pahsimeroi, then the North and South Forks make their contribution until, by the time the Salmon reaches the Snake River, it is a magnificent and powerful body of water.

So the gathering river of revelation grows wider and deeper as we trace it’s course through the scriptures until it finds it’s final form, not in a gigantic figure, but in a tiny child, whom the angels said was “Christ the Lord.”

We may unknowingly overlook the significance of his name, Christ: it is the Greek form of the Hebrew word for “Anointed One” or “Messiah.” But the title conceals another gigantic truth: “Lord” is the word used by the Septuagint-the Greek translation of the Old Testament-for God himself. The angel was very bold: this child is not only the long awaited Messiah, the Consolation of Israel. This little one was nothing less than the infinite God-God “contracted to a span” (Donne).

What Child is this? He is the Eternal One, the Alpha and Omega, the one at the beginning and end of human history. This is the one who created all things. The one who holds all things together. The one who stands at the end of time to receive back the universe, because it was made by Him and for Him.

The Creator became a creature of time; the Infinite became infinitesimal. “The God who had been only a circumference was seen as a center and that center was infinitely small” (G.K. Chesterton). This one whose hands created the universe put himself in our hands, entrusted himself to the human race, made himself so incredibly weak and vulnerable-to bring us salvation.

Salvation! That’s the word in the announcement that got the shepherd’s attention-and should get ours: “Today, in the city of David, a Savior has been born to you.” Here’s a God who wanted to save so badly that he got down and dirty, the only God worth having; the only God for you and me.

It seems,” said Tirian, smiling himself, “that the stable seen from within and the stable seen from without are two very different places.”

“Yes,” said the Lord Digory. “Its inside is bigger than its outside.”

“Yes”, said Queen Lucy. “In our world too, a Stable once had something inside that was bigger than our whole world” (C.S. Lewis).