How will we reply to the greatest invitation of all this Christmas?
This is a time of year when we often find ourselves needing to make space. For example, when we have to squeeze a couple of extra chairs around the table to make room for old friends we haven’t seen in ages; or when a little one has to sit on his mum’s lap at a packed carol service to make space for grandma on the end.
Once noticed, such simple acts of making space, out of what sometimes can feel like nothing, are occasions that can remind us of a core theme that runs through the story of God that we have been given to share with the world; for one way of describing this story is that it’s all about making space.
In the beginning, God creates the universe. But if you think about it for a moment, for there to be that which is not God means there has to be a new dimension, one that is distinct from God. In other words, God needs to make space for there even to be such a thing as creation.
Put another way, for there to be that which is other than God requires God to willingly withdraw—to contract, as it were—to empty God’s own self so that there can be that which is entirely other than God. Out of the nothing that has been opened up by God’s contraction comes creation (Jewish mystics, such as Isaac Luriac in the 16th century deliberately drew on this language of giving birth). God, as we know, declares it to be good.
However, this creation, by its very nature of being other than God, is inherently bestowed with a freedom: on the one hand the freedom to do good, but on the other, the same freedom to do ill. The story of Adam and Eve and the serpent tells of the temptation we experience when we exercise this freedom.
Both in spite of and because of our ill-judged exercising of freedom, God then chooses to be present to His creation. God gives specific instructions to the Israelites on how they are to make space within creation to encounter the presence of God. Firstly, it is in a mobile tent, the tabernacle; later, it is in a fixed building, the temple in Jerusalem.
But even granted this encounter with God’s presence within creation, the freedom to do ill as well as good remains. As the story of God’s people continues, they turn from their calling and in time God sends them into exile and the presence of God departs from the temple.
Hundreds of years pass. The temple is rebuilt in an effort to remake the space where God might be encountered but the question is when will the presence of God return? It is at this moment that we turn in our story to a young woman, named Mary, and the angel Gabriel’s announcement to her that she is to be with child: ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you’ (Luke 1).
This is the moment when creation, in the form of Mary’s womb, makes space for God the Son, for the baby Jesus. The act of making space has been turned inside out. First, it was God making space for creation. But then, within the vast reaches of creation, on a small planet of a minor galaxy, in the backwaters of the Roman Empire, in one young woman’s womb, space is made for God.
We learn, too, an important thing in this story, namely that it is not God’s character to be coercive. For this all to happen, for space to be made for God within God’s own creation, Mary must give her assent to the angel’s announcement. It is her yes—‘let it be with me according to your word’—that is the moment that allows this to happen.
God, by granting creation this freedom, has chosen that God can only be with us if we choose to make space for God.
But not all of creation responds with a yes. The principalities and powers of this world—the entrenched dynamics of the consequences of the sustained ill exercise of freedom—line up and do their utmost to negate the very space made for God. Thirty years later, Mary’s child, now a grown man, is unjustly executed. With the murder of Jesus, the space made within creation for God is emptied of God.
But having been made the space for that which is other than God, it is as if this space can never be sealed up or definitively closed to God’s continuing creative love. Out of the nothing of the empty tomb, God the Father raises Jesus from the dead, making space within the old space of creation for the new creation to begin.
After his resurrection, the Son of God ascends to God the Father. The human nature of Jesus—this pivotal concentration of space and time made within creation for God to be with creation—is now within God’s own triune being. The Word made flesh has ascended.
From such dizzying thoughts, we come, finally, to our part of the story. The one in which we we find ourselves making space around the table at Christmas time or shuffling along the pew before the start of a carol service. In the beginning, God makes space for creation. Then creation, firstly in the tabernacle, then in the temple, and then in Mary’s womb, makes space for God; Mary becoming the Mother of God by making space for God within her.
Likewise, we in our turn are given a choice. Like Mary, we are made in the image and likeness of God. And God’s character as we know is not coercive. God will not force us to make space within us for God the Holy Spirit. As we are part of creation—that which is other than God—we retain our integral freedom to reject God. We are free to say we choose to make no space within us for God, and instead be preoccupied with other matters.
But just as we are free to say no, we are also free to say, yes. Free to answer our calling as human beings and become, each and every one of us, the space where God the Holy Spirit enters creation and takes up residence within it.
As with Mary, all we need do to make space for God, is to say ‘yes’. And then, akin to Mary, wait for that space in our hearts to be filled.
In love, God waits patiently for our answer.