"His Chariot is Humility"

Advent and Christmas sickness and hope

I moved the digital thermometer off of the top of the laptop and gently scooted the lidded cups with drooping, haphazard straws out of the way. It was Christmas Eve, very early morning. The tree glowed from the corner, the twinkling white lights gentle in the darkness. The children, fevered and not, were still nestled in their beds.

Or they were, until I finished typing the last sentence. The four-year-old’s clunky tread sounded on the stairs just when I thought I could, perhaps, write a long-overdue Substack post. But no. Our boy’s glazed eyes and burning brow needed me, as did the baby, whose cries sounded from the stairwell a few minutes later. And then our tiny seven-year-old daughter and baggy-eyed nine-year-old son emerged with discomfort and fatigue to sit, wordless and sick, next to me on the couch while I breastfed the baby. By the time I’d medicated and gotten water cups and caressed and re-tucked in, the writing had once again taken a backseat to bodily priorities, including my own. I closed the laptop and went back to sleep.

Much of Advent and these early days of Christmas have reminded me—indeed, impressed upon my mortal flesh—the visceral necessity of our Lord’s nativity. Amid the tinsel and sparkle and sugared roar of our weary, empty world, the very cells of our mortal forms cry out for deliverance. This can’t be all, our souls tick at us, ever aware, even in our most fevered efforts to forget, of the dust to which we are slowly returning. Illness has pointed me, yet again, outside myself and any other human consolation to One who has overcome the world.

And how did He do this? By an amazing inversion: by entering, Himself, into our humanity. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” John wrote after seeing and hearing and touching Him. God incarnate in the baby grown into the man Jesus.

A portion of “The Adoration of the Shepherds,” by Anton Raphael Mengs, 1764-1765 (Source). The shepherd’s hands by Mary’s feet, his knees on the floor, the straw and the cattle ground the ethereal beauty of the figures.

It was another early morning weeks ago, in darkness, that I found myself in a bathroom, feeling decidedly wretched. Most of our family felt the same. Suffice it to say that a stomach bug had invaded our household, and after a creeping start, it hit six of us, mostly within a span of several hours. As I leaned against a countertop, fully attentive to the insistent waves of nausea thrumming through me, I thought, “Who would ever choose to experience this?” The rhetorical question answered itself. No one would choose this. No one, that is, except for our God.

There’s a part in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, one of my favorite seasonal reads since Mrs. Elliott’s fifth grade class, that speaks to this. The narrator and her prissy friend, Alice Wendleken, are watching the unconventional emergence of the Christmas story as acted out by the Herdman kids, who are “absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world.”¹ Imogene Herdman is Mary, and she’s just “slung up” the doll Jesus onto her shoulder. “Before she put it in the manger,” the narrator observes, “she thumped it twice on the back.” Alice is aghast, again.

“I don’t think it’s very nice to burp the baby Jesus,” she whispered, “as if he had colic.” Then she poked me again. “Do you suppose he could have had colic?”

I said, “I don’t know why not,” and I didn’t. He could have had colic, or been fussy, or hungry like any other baby. After all, that was the whole point of Jesus—that he didn’t come down on a cloud like something out of “Amazing Comics,” but that he was born and lived…a real person.

While it’s not gracious or Victorian to mention, the facts of Jesus’s humanity are precisely what make Christmas so special. It’s why, in part, we can be so joyful and gleeful when we grasp the sacred import of Christmas, just as children are. Sure, we have the angelic hosts and miraculous star, themselves testament to the otherworldliness of Jesus. But as our eyes water from coughing, our hair matted from uneasy reclining, our skin smelly and soiled and dirty from the very diseases that wear down and wear out our flesh, our raspy voices confess that He knew this, too. The sticky, helpless newborn, born amid the pungent excrement of lowing animals, stabled himself in our putrescence and made it life. Not by the sweep of a magic wand, or a distant command from afar, or a caped superhero moment, but by entering, Himself, into a feeble body.

We don’t know exactly what He experienced, of course. But as the narrator noted above, many qualities of babyhood could easily have been his. Digestive discomfort might have plagued his infancy, or just been an incidental occurrence. But don’t all babies, everywhere, have at least one tummy gurgle or spell of glurking, as one mom so aptly put it? The mess was inevitable as soon as He emerged into air.

So Jesus lived with the discomforts and pains of mortal existence, from scabs to sneezing, freezing to flu, bruises to body aches, while He also was our Holy God. A verse from the Advent hymn “Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Mighty Gates” nods to this:

A righteous Helper comes to thee; His chariot is humility,

His kingly crown is holiness, His scepter, pity in distress.

The end of all our woe He brings: Therefore the earth is glad and sings.

To Christ the Savior raise Your grateful hymns of praise.

=LSB #341, verse 2

As my husband pointed out, “chariot” here is a translation that probably referred to something along the lines of a mantle. That is, a burden Christ willingly took on as a servant-king, to bear what we do. He carried humility. And what is more humbling than sickness and bodily weakness?²

What we know as regular toil and trouble became His. Long before He bore the cross to Golgatha, He felt the scratch of straw upon his tender newborn skin and the sting of careless scratches. His body, carried by another, bumped and bounced to Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath.³ And just as He lived this, so we live with our physical burdens. We can even embrace them, knowing that they are not in vain. “Accordingly, God humbles those who are His to exalt them; He kills them to make them alive; He confounds them to glorify them; He makes them subject to raise them up,” Luther wrote.⁴ Even as death approaches,

I support myself with this consolation that I believe in God’s Son. And yet I am buried; I am eaten by worms; I am consumed by the most foul rottenness, as Job says (Job 17:14)… Here I do not discern God’s plan, that although I die and rot away, I must at some time be revived. But God has promised and said (cf. John 14:19): “You will live, for I live, and you will live. I am the Lord your God!” How? In eternal life and with a more beautiful and brighter body than the body of the sun.

And here we see glimmers of hope, even as our bodies are wracked with all sorts of trials. The very strain and sufferings we experience are the things that point us to what we are promised.

At present I do not see or feel this, but I believe it and suffer this very short delay. For this life has already been prepared, and in the meantime the crown of the kingdom and glory is being prepared “which the Lord will give me on that Day, the righteous Judge,” as Paul says (2 Tim. 4:8), “and not only to me, but also to those who love His coming.”

We are still coughing here, and we will keep getting sick until Jesus returns or we die, whichever comes first. And yet He lifts up our heads beyond our medicine bottles and bleary gazes. He tells us again, “Take heart. I have overcome the world.” He comes, and He came, and He will come again. He shows us His hands and His side, the same that laid in the manger.

Merry Christmas.

1. One of my favorite opening book lines.

2. I feel incumbent to mention that I lost my glasses some weeks ago. As I write this, I can barely see the screen because I haven’t put in my contacts. Yet another reminder of mortal decrepitude.

3. Today we remember the Holy Innocents, martyrs.

4. From his commentary on Genesis, as quoted in The Treasure of Daily Prayer reading for December 28.