The Call to Radical Faith

The story Luke tells about the birth of Jesus is full of the unexpected.  Of course, it is not Luke's story to create and make up, he is simply telling things the way God orchestrated it to happen.  So it might be more appropriate to say that the way heaven planned the birth of Jesus is full of the unexpected.  After all, who would have picked Bethlehem?  It was a small insignificant place.  And, who would have picked a couple like Mary and Joseph to parent the holy child?  They were so young, it was learning by trial and error as it is for most of us.  And finally, who would put the shepherds on center stage in a night that was changing history?   

From beginning to end it is an unlikely story.  It is an unlikely plan.  It fails the logic test.  From beginning to end it not the logic and common sense of folks which is tested, but their faith and trust in God.  What one of us can imagine the degree of faith exercised by Mary when she submitted herself so completely to the divine will and plan?  The night Jesus came into the world of flesh as a mere baby was a night filled with people involved in what God was doing because of their radical faith in Him.     

Maybe Christmas calls us to be involved in that kind of faith as well.  To believe and accept the birth of the Holy One is an act of radical faith in itself even though we seldom see it as such.  The event of Bethlehem is something which goes beyond any sense of understanding and the only way which provides any response at all is the way of faith.  To believe that God was about extraordinary work that night for the likes of you and me is in the final analysis such a radical departure from anything which makes sense that our only response is the kind of submission modeled for us in the life of the mother of the Holy Child.