Crossing Infinity
It's Not Possible, It's Necessary
How can the infinite enter the finite?
This question has been boggling me for several weeks. I'm leading my Lifegroup through the book of Colossians, so I've spent a lot of time reading and meditating on the book over the last month or so. The first chapter notably contains some sort of doxology or song or poem about Christ's preeminence in verses 15-20. In this Christmas season, those verses have been particularly stuck in my mind. He is the invisible God's visible image; everything, visible and invisible, was created through Him and for Him; He holds all things together; all the fullness of God dwells in Him. It's Christmas in Colossians.
That may sound odd to you. But being the weirdo I am, my favorite rendition of the Christmas story is how John tells it in his Gospel. So much of Christmas is about Mary and Joseph, stables and mangers, angels and shepherds, wise men and kings. And all of that is important. The historical details matter. But while the other Gospels tell us what happened, John tells us what it meant. The Word was with God and was God from the beginning; the Word was life and light, shining in the darkness; the Word became flesh and blood, living among us; in Him we see God's glory, graceful and true. John 1 sounds a lot like Colossians 1. It sounds like Christmas.
To me, this deep theological mystery is the biggest miracle of Christmas. We may not ponder it enough. Yes, the Christmas story has fulfilled prophecies, angelic revelations, and astronomical phenomena, all true. But those seem quaint when juxtaposed with God becoming a man. And not just a man, a baby, born to be the servant of all. How could that even happen? How does the eternal put on the temporal? How does the fullness of an omnipresent omnipotent God inhabit skin and bone? How can the infinite be said to arrive in a specific, finite, time and space? I'm not an engineer, but I'm pretty good at math, and the math on that doesn't work. It's impossible. Which means it's a miracle.
It's the single most jaw-dropping miracle in the complete history of the cosmos. Well, except for one more.
A few weekends ago I had the delightful privilege of taking my family to watch the 10th Anniversary IMAX re-release of Christopher Nolan's phenomenal film, Interstellar. It has long been one of my favorite movies, ever since it came out in 2014, in fact. As someone who enjoys movies, I've had a lot of fun movie-watching experiences in theaters. But the single most enjoyable and memorable experience I've ever had in a movie theater was when my wife and I saw Interstellar in the IMAX opening weekend ten years ago.
The famous "docking" scene at the climax of the story is especially powerful. Nolan displays absolute genius at using both the enormous screen format and the earth-shaking sound system in the IMAX to create what I think may be one of the best sequences ever put on film. Hans Zimmer's thundering organ-driven score from that pivotal scene has lived rent-free in my head for a decade. It also has one of my favorite lines ever written. As the hero charges desperately into a disaster to save all humanity from the villain's sabotaging selfishness, one of his companions says: "It's not possible." "No," the hero replies, "It's necessary." The whole movie is tremendous, but that scene is utterly transfixing. I'm happy to report that it was just as good the second time in IMAX, ten years later.
Nolan is one of my favorite directors because of his attention to detail, leaving little tidbits or hints scattered through his movies that you often don't notice till the second, third, or even fourth time through. Between the two IMAX showings and the numerous times I've re-watched it at home, I've probably seen Interstellar a dozen times or thereabouts. But something new occurred to me after seeing it again most recently. I think it's actually a Christmas movie. Hear me out. Do you think Christopher Nolen accidentally made a movie that was released in the holiday season, featuring Academy-Award-Nominated organ music recorded in a historic London church, the central premise of which is that only love can cross the relativistic limitations of the universe (space, time, and gravity) to save mankind from certain death? That doesn't seem like it happened by accident to me. It sounds like Christmas.
"It's not possible, it's necessary." Is there a better way to describe the paradox of the incarnation?
Goodbye has also been on my mind a lot recently.
At first, it was just because I was leaving my job. Last Wednesday was my last day at D6 Family Ministry (formerly Randall House), where I worked for almost eleven years. It made for a meaningful milestone: since I grew up moving around a lot as a missionary kid, the ten-plus years I was at D6 is the longest I've been in any one place in my life. As a small, tightly knit organization, we became very much like family. And leaving family is hard. So me being me, I did what I do: I wrote my coworkers a farewell note musing on the nature of goodbyes. I thought that those thoughts, which I will borrow shortly, were just for that occasion. But just a few hours after I sent that final email, I got a text from my mom Wednesday evening.
Grandma wasn't doing well.
The timing of my unemployment made it easy to rearrange our family schedule a bit the next day; I went with my wife to our daughter's afternoon appointments at Vanderbilt, and then we all drove together from there to my grandparents's apartment in Franklin where we got to visit for a while. I'm so glad and thankful the Lord worked out that timing because Grandma went to meet Him later that night. It cast an entirely different light on the words I had written just the day before (slightly edited):
My paternal grandfather had a curious habit. He would never say, "Goodbye." He would instead always say, "So long!" and sometimes also throw in, "See you later!" afterward. When we would initiate with our own goodbye, he would insist: "This isn't goodbye, just so long." Even as he lost his faculties to dementia and stopped recognizing his children and grandchildren, he would still say the same thing when anyone left: "So long!" It struck me as a little odd as a child, but as I got older, I've often wondered if it's because he had to say goodbye too many times during his military service.
It's a hard thing to say goodbye. In the missionary orientation we went through as kids, they tried to prepare us; it's a lifestyle that necessarily requires a lot of leaving and a lot of goodbyes. And I've had a lot of practice. It still hasn't made perfect yet, though. It's more familiar, but it has yet to get any easier.
Some of the kids these days aren't sure birds are real, but my conspiracy theory is that goodbyes aren't real. They imply a permanency that isn't permanent, a certainty that isn't certain. Who can say what God will do? I think the reason we all find goodbyes hard is because somewhere, tucked away in that eternity placed in our hearts, we know that goodbye isn't supposed to exist. It shouldn't be a thing. Turns out Grandpa was onto something after all.
In her own way, my maternal Grandma was onto the same thing. See, her favorite hymn, which she sang over us regularly when we were children, was: "Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine; oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!" Both she and my grandfather were tuned into the same truth, the "deeper magic" as C.S. Lewis called it. Or as Paul puts it in Colossians 1, the mystery hidden for ages and generations, now revealed to His saints: Christ in us, the hope of glory.
The only miracle more shocking than Advent is that the incarnation wasn't merely a one-way ticket for one traveler. The infinite entered the finite so that we finite creatures might have access to the infinite. Jesus arrived so He could make a way, laying down His life in transcendent love, tearing the veil, piercing our space-time reality, and creating a narrow road crossing into His eternal reality. For us. What was impossible became possible. Necessary, you might even say. What a glorious mystery! It sounds like Christmas.
To Grandma, I say this: So long! I'll see you later!
To the rest of you: Merry Christmas!
Well done and thought provoking