The God Who Bends Low

The transformative power of presence that defines the gospel is demonstrated by God’s third move to bend to be with his people. As author of this story, God gives himself the name, “Emmanuel,” which means, “God with us.” In this way God embraces the concept of “with” to be his very identity. He does not stand far off from his people. Rather the gospel story speaks of a God who makes his home among them. He does so by becoming human in the person of Jesus, who is both fully human and fully divine. In his birth, God bends to the lowly position of a vulnerable infant, born into poverty, fully dependent upon another to sustain him and provide for him. In his life he experiences hunger and thirst. He grieves the loss of a friend. He endures criticism of his character by the elite and powerful. He is abandoned by his friends. Those who have sought to articulate the transformative power of this form of presence explain, “When he found himself in the form of a human, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:7-8). Jesus’ death on a cross demonstrates God bending to the darkest parts of human experience. On the cross he experienced excruciating pain, but perhaps even worse, he experienced the great weight of shame. He was stripped naked, hung for all to see, mocked and made a spectacle. Though he was God, this was not seen. Rather both his humanity and his divinity were neglected by onlookers who deemed him an object to destroy. He endured the great relational break first seen in Genesis, and then he died and was buried. 

For those who are familiar with this story, there is often a desire to rush to the next move of God, an essential move to be certain, but yet to rush there too quickly is to deny the gospel its entire transformative power, for it is a power of presence. In God’s bending low he also chose to remain. Jesus stayed in the tomb for three days and in that staying he aligned himself with all who feel that suffering is unending, for all who cannot see light through the darkness. The day known as Holy Saturday in the Christian church declares that God bent all the way to the grave. Yet, even there one discovers the transformative power of presence. For there, “The wound becomes the site of growth - creative, generative, and alive” (Shelly Rambo, The Spirit of Trauma, p. 77). This new creation flows from the same place as the original creation. Relational love sends God to the depths of the grave, to the places of darkest suffering, where human tears mingle with the tears of the divine. In God’s choosing to stay, there is a prophetic cry that declares this is not how it should be. The transformative power of a God who is present through bending and remaining is that it invites humanity to lament. It unites the hearts of all who suffer with the very heart of God, a heart that longed to restore the broken relationships that mar the world so greatly that he entered into suffering in order to redeem it. In God’s choosing to bend and remain, he meets humanity in its pain and demonstrates that no darkness is so dark that God cannot be found there, and where he is found restored relationships are made possible.