Not What We Were Expecting

An Advent Reflection from a Mexican Restaurant

She flipped the lid off her burger and stared at it. 

“This is not what I was expecting. What is this?”

She reached down, picked up the patty, and held it in front of her, limp. 

“What is this?”

“That’s a hamburger,” I replied. “From the moment you sat down, you asked for a hamburger. That’s what you ordered. This is a hamburger,” I said as I pointed to the meat. 

“Well, it’s not what I was expecting,” she reiterated. 

Eventually it came out that the five-year-old daughter of mine wanted a cheeseburger (or a grilled cheese sandwich — I’m not sure, but the common denominator was cheese). She was disappointed. Clearly. She went on to eat her fries and obliterated her hamburger with ketchup, only to poke around at the soggy mess and let it sit. 

Enter Advent 

The baby from a backwoods town, born a distance from Bethlehem in a shepherd’s cave — born in utter poverty, born as an outsider — and wrapped in swaddling clothes, he was not what we were expecting in the Messiah. 

(See?! The burger story had a point. )

That the Messiah would come in such a way was unthinkable. It was utterly unfathomable. This advent reveals the sign of God is his hiddenness. The sign of God is smallness. It is humility. 

We were not expecting the lowliness of God in Jesus Christ. 

Even John the Baptist seems baffled. John had announced that one mightier than he was coming, one who would baptize not with water, but with the Holy Spirit and fire (cf. Mt. 3:11). Then, Jesus begins his ministry and all of this is apparently not what John expected, because he sends his own disciples to ask Jesus if he’s the Messiah or if they should be looking for someone else (cf. Lk. 7:19). 

The God who created the universe, the God who “with mighty hand and outstretched arm” led Israel out of Egypt, a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night, the God who routed Israel’s enemies on all sides, is the God who spoke in a still small voice to Elijah, and who remained silently present to the Jews in Babylonian captivity and all the other captivities. And, he is the God who takes flesh in the womb of a 14-year-old girl in Nazareth. The miraculous conception was a silent event, a coming far removed from any sort of flashy fanfare or mighty works (it was a mighty work, but not in the display of power we might have in mind). The birth nine months later was just as unremarkable as the Annunciation in worldly terms. In fact, it was subhuman in a sense — he was born in a stable of animals. The people in the town made no room for him. “Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave” (Phil. 2:7). 

God took flesh in complete silence and was born in abject poverty. He willingly silenced himself before his persecutors and offered himself in abject poverty on the Cross. 

Throughout the span of his life, he was not what we were expecting for the son of God who would rout the Romans and rule on David’s throne forever. 

There are, then, two signs of the presence of God. The first is that of creation — a sign of greatness, of power, of might. The second consists of hiddenness, lowliness, humility. So many of the covenants we read about in the Old Testament bear the marks of the first sign of God — that of power. Smallness marks the New Covenant. We see this most clearly today, in the Eucharist, the sign of the New and Everlasting Covenant. 

Peering into the Second Sign

However, if we look hard enough, we can see in this second sign, that of lowliness, a mysterious greatness that is greater than all the power the powers of the world could muster. Here’s how Joseph Ratzinger puts it:

In the end, the truly great does not lie in the size of the physical dimensions but in what is no longer measurable through them. In truth, what is great by physical quantities is only a preliminary form of magnitude. The real and the highest values ​​occur in this world precisely under the sign of lowliness, obscurity, silence. The great thing about which the destiny and the history of the world hangs is that which appears small in our eyes. In Bethlehem, God, who had chosen the small, forgotten people of Israel as His people, finally made the sign of littleness the decisive sign of His presence in this world. It is the decision of the holy night - the faith - that we accept it in this sign and trust it without grumbling; accept him - that is: to subject ourselves to these signs, the truth and the love, which are the highest, godlike values ​​and the most forgotten.

The definitive sign of God is love — a love that spends itself to the point of giving himself away completely. Yet, in giving himself away so completely, Jesus Christ loves to the point of becoming all in all (cf. 1 Cor. 15:28), thus manifesting the greatest and highest truth tucked away in the lowliness of a wooden manger and, eventually, hanging from a wooden Cross. 

No. This kind of closeness with God is not what we expect, but it’s exactly what we need, so long as we have the humility to lower ourselves and receive it.