An Ordinary God?
The Ordinary and Extraordinary at Advent
About the author: Sara recently submitted her dissertation at the University of Aberdeen on the concept of divine personhood in Karl Barth. Sara is passionate about theological study, especially modern and contemporary doctrines of God, and its import for the life of the church and world. She currently lives in Aberdeen, Scotland, with her husband and two daughters.
As the calendar, yet again, reaches the last month of the year, we enter the season of Advent. A season of preparation and waiting for the coming one. Advent is supposed to be a time to slow down and reflect in awe on the wonder of God-made-flesh—the God who came and tabernacled among us. Advent is a longing and looking forward to something extraordinary.
Yet, the Christmas season is the most stressful time of the year for many people, especially for mothers such as myself. I love Christmas and the holiday season and take great joy in planning and preparing all the celebrations and gifts for my family. As much as I love Christmas, I will be the first to admit that the preparation is exhausting. Absolutely exhausting. The to-do list seems unending. The busyness and demands of the season can easily drain away any of my joy. I often wonder, Why do I, and so many others, run myself ragged in a season that should be restful?
It is my desire to create something special or extraordinary for my family that fuels the hurried pace of my life in December. I am not alone in feeling this way. Journalist Jennifer B. Wallace summarizes the source of Christmas stress:
At the core of holiday overwhelm and over-functioning is the expectation of what “good” parents, namely mothers, are expected to do: create picture-perfect memories and rich holiday traditions for everyone, piled on top of the heavy mental load mothers already carry day in and day out managing their family’s busy lives.
The holiday season is the time every year when we pause, usually gathering with family and friends, to try to break through our ordinary day-to-day lives to experience something extraordinary—it could be the special religious services, the once-a-year showstopper foods, those cookies you only make at Christmas, the (hopefully) thoughtful gifts, acts of service, or the simple act of gathering with loved ones.
However, the extraordinary that we long to create and experience at Christmas is built upon the ordinary. It is the prior ordinary and day-to-day tasks of shopping, planning, decorating, baking, and cooking that make the extraordinary possible. These tasks are on top of the average 2.26 hours of household activities women complete a day. In an attempt to leave behind the mundane and experience something special, I end up crushed and overwhelmed by the growing weight of ordinary day-to-day tasks.
I find that when the extraordinary, the special, the unique is demanded, the everyday business of life tends to become devalued—it is something to be endured so that something else can be enjoyed. I do not think desiring the extraordinary is wrong. The Old Testament Law set up by God includes a yearly calendar of regular festivals that punctuate the everyday with special times of celebration. The issue is what I judge to be extraordinary.
It is at this juncture between the extraordinary and the ordinary that the babe-in-manger turns all our notions upside down. Immanuel, God with us, did not come to us the way most people would expect God to show up. Immanuel did not come in power or wealth or beauty: “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2). I imagine God would come in some extraordinary way that cannot be missed—something flashy and grand. I expect God to part the Red Sea or save his people from the Lion’s Den. If I am being honest, often I prefer this version of an “extraordinary” God.
The reality of Christmas, the extraordinary that we await during Advent, disrupts and challenges all our notions of God. Karl Barth was keenly aware of the challenge Christ posed to our concepts of God—our idols of the extraordinary. As Barth discusses the mystery of Christ’s condescension, he outlines Christ’s lordship:
As the Lord He became a servant, in which as a child He lay in a crib in the stall at Bethlehem, in which in Jordan He entered the way of penitence, in which He was hungry and thirsty and had nowhere to lay His head, in which He washed the feet of His disciples, in which He prayed alone in Gethsemane, in which He was rejected by Israel and judged and condemned by the Gentiles, in which He hung in opprobrium on the cross of Golgotha…For it is the mystery of the true Godhead of Jesus Christ that He was able and willing to do what He did do in obedience.1
It is important to swell on this point: Barth identifies the humility and condescension of Jesus Christ with his divine nature. Traditionally, Christian theology has identified the humility of Christ with his humanity. However, Barth’s theology operates with the conviction that we know the divine nature through Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ confronts our expectations and surprises us. God comes to us as the baby of poor parents. He is a carpenter’s son. Jesus Christ is an utterly “ordinary” human. This God cannot be easily managed and relegated to “extraordinary” events. This God is with us in the ordinary and the extraordinary.
However, it is in Jesus Christ that the glory of God, or the extraordinary, is revealed and known. Barth is adamant that we must see the true and majestic nature of God in Christ:
This concealment [the incarnation] and therefore His condescension as such, is the image and reflection in which we see Him as He is. His glory is the freedom of the love which He exercises and reveal in all this. In this respect it differs from the unfree and loveless glory of all the gods imagined by men.2
The selfless love of God revealed in Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection is the truly extraordinary. This is the type of love that does not annihilate and push out the ordinary. The love of God does not endure the ordinary but willingly takes it up with joy.
As I look at my Christmas to-do list, I want to reevaluate my motivations for everything on that list. I want to align my desire to create special, extraordinary moments for my family with what corresponds to and reflects the extraordinary love of God revealed in Jesus Christ. I do not want to rush through and dismiss the ordinary because of my idol of the “extraordinary.” I want to savor small, ordinary moments to love my family and friends. I do not want to miss out on recognizing “ordinary” moments where the extraordinary and surprising God is present.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV/1, 4 vols. in 13 pts, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–75), 635.
Barth, CD IV/1, 188.