Joy: Week Three – Day One
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. – Isaiah 35:5-6 (NRSV)
The ministry of Jesus Christ is full of the miraculous. He healed those who could not walk and gave sight to the blind. We know that He walked on water and calmed a raging storm. He fed thousands of people with a few pieces of bread, and once He made a coin appear from the mouth of a fish. John writes in his Gospel that Jesus did so many miracles that they couldn’t begin to have written them all down. But I have to say, of all the miracles, the coin-in-the-fish thing seems the most like a magic trick.
Let me ask you this: just for fun, what would you say was Jesus’ most extraordinary miracle? You might think it’s one of the fancier miracles like walking on water or calming the storm. Or, you might jump straight to the resurrection as His most impressive feat. However, what if it’s something else? What if it’s something that literally every person alive today has done?
Every human being who is alive has gone through the process of birth. There are different ways of being born, of course, and we don’t need to get into that here. Yet, every human alive was formed in the belly of a woman and brought into this world to undergo the human experience. Even though Adam and Eve weren’t ‘born’ in the typical sense, they still lived the human experience. However, Jesus isn’t just human.
Now, the idea of Jesus actually having a definitive “Most Extraordinary Miracle” is not real. This is just a thought experiment. However, since it is the season of Advent, maybe we should consider the birth of Jesus as fully human and fully divine as His most extraordinary miracle. We call this event the Incarnation, and without it none of the other miracles are possible. This is the moment that heaven touches Earth and they mix together. This is the moment that Love came down and took on human skin. What would it mean for us to think of Jesus’ birth as His most extraordinary miracle?
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