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Baby Jesus smashes systems of order

By Mark Johnson - posted Friday, 17 December 2010


Jesus of Nazareth revealed the Living God to be not a deity of Olympian attributes, not a pristine metaphysical idea too perfect to be associated with matter, and not a deity to which structures of privilege and power could be appealed to for legitimation (although they have tried).

Jesus of Nazareth revealed the Living God within the midst of the ordinary, of that always overlooked by those addicted to extravagance and spectacle. He spoke to the outcast, to the poor, to the weak; he befriended sinners, ritually becoming what he associated with, and was thereby exiled from that other deity of purity and might.

The Living God, the God we claim to worship this coming Christmas, is the God of ritual impurity, the God of weakness, and of holy disorder.

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It was not the pure, the powerful, the cool, or the celebrity that were sought, for they have had their time in the sun. The Incarnation casts the mighty from their executive boards and sends the rich to the soup kitchen. The order of privilege is overturned and pulled inside out.

The Incarnation is the basis of our faith. It is the event that smashed once and for all those systems whose only purpose is to prevent any actual encounter with the Living God, or any freedom from the many tyrannies of order.

Metaphysicians are horrified that their ground of order can become realised as a human, can be realised as that very disorder its elaborate systems have so derided. The high priesthoods of order know that their authority means nothing if God has been made so pedestrian, so available, so, so…human. All standard bearers of exclusion and injustice are simply shown as irrelevant by the Incarnation.

So yet again this unruly feast of the intrusive God rudely enters our year, and yes it is increasingly difficult to meet this God - the systems of order spend a lot of time and effort sealing over the breach through which Incarnation erupted. We are given excuses to forget. But not all breaches can be sealed, especially when history has been torn open. Within our hearts we know; the Incarnation still speaks, and order has been undone.

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About the Author

Mark Johnson teaches in the Department of Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney, where he is a PhD candidate. In January, he is teaching a course at the the university's Summer School titled Christianity as a Global Religion.

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