So, today, my wife wanted to show me something posted on Facebook by a friend of ours. In taking her phone from her, I, as I invariably do on such occasions, put my thumb on the screen. There then followed much scrolling by her while I held the phone by its edges in the tips of my fingers. Somewhere mid scroll the attached image appeared, posted by someone in celebration of the Supreme Court's decision to strike down its previous decision in Roe v. Wade.
Now, I know that people mean well. Nevertheless, there are places which scare me.
For example, Gethsemane is a very frightening place. I have Evangelical, even Reformed, friends who ask me what I am doing for Lent. I know that they do not believe in Penance. They tell me that they are trying to identify with Christ’s self-denial. Yet, how can forty days without chocolate compare with accepting Gethsemane’s bitter cup?
Because the servant is not greater than his master, believers will, to varying degrees, experience the things which men inflicted on Christ. But they will never know what was in that cup because that is the very reason why Christ drank it. He identified with us.
More to the point, Bethlehem scares me. The shepherds rejoiced having seen and heard the angels and having seen the Child in the manger. Did it cross their minds that they had seen God and lived? If the ground around the burning bush was holy, what was the straw under their feet? The veil of His true body and reasonable soul made the difference between the Son of God being in that stable and the Shekinah filling Solomon’s Temple. The Person set before us in our complex Chalcedonian Christology was laid in a feed trough. There is something frightening about that juxtaposition: until love casts out the fear.
Then the image which imparts neither the humiliation of the circumstances nor the wonder of the incarnation has written over it “unplanned”. Leaving aside the fact that to a woman in the situation to which the word alludes, unplanned is either an understatement or a euphemism, the birth of Christ was planned. God told Eve about it, and He told Isaiah to tell Ahaz about it. The fulfilment of prophecy takes providential planning. If the Son of God came into the world to save sinners, then the cross was planned; and if the cross was planned, then so was the manger; and if the manger was planned, then so was the census. The visit of Gabriel was also part of the plan; and Mary was a knowing and willing participant in it.
Abortion is no longer a Federal matter. But it is still a federal matter. The Covenant of Works demands that we define what we mean by innocent babies. The Covenant of Redemption will not permit us to put unplanned and the manger in the same meme.
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