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The Rev. Frank
Logue Christmas—the
Counter-Revolution We had plans for every possible attack and counter attack. We had plotted and planned, for centuries really, until every eventuality had been carefully called into account. We knew how every possible move He could make could be thwarted. Yet, we never saw it coming. But I get ahead of myself. Best to go back to the beginning. It started when our leader, Lucifer, led a revolt against God. We were cast down, for the time being, but Lucifer had a plan and while we had lost the battle, the revolution had begun. We could win the war for heaven and earth. We just needed to wait and watch, for the right time. Sin came into the world effortlessly enough. It only took a single choice to get humans to turn away from God. It didn’t matter that the choice was the knowledge of Good and Evil, it could have been the knowledge of where to get the perfect Cappuccino. Ask a human to deny his or herself a choice and soon enough they will do the very thing that is forbidden. And so humans learned to turn away from God. But we knew that was not the end of the matter, for God cared for the miserable little creatures so much that he kept working at it. God sent prophets and kept sending them. It was all too easy to get those whiners put to death. You don’t even need to dispatch a demon to sit on someone’s shoulder for a job like that. Try to disturb the status quo and soon enough you’ll pay. And the prophets were made to pay. Isaiah might have instilled hope in humanity for a time, but he was sawn in two in a hollow log. Then up would pop another prophet, like Zechariah who was slain in the Temple of all places. Again and again the prophets called on the people to turn back to God. Some people would listen, while others would kill the prophet. This is when we started running all the scenarios, playing them out in the minutest detail. We knew the prophecies better than any Hebrew scholar. But we never saw the bigger picture. We knew the Messiah would be born to a Virgin. We knew he would be a descendant of David. We knew to look in Bethlehem. We knew it all. But the piece of the puzzle that we never comprehended was that that baby boy would be God. Not like God, not some adopted child of God, but God. That infant wrapped in swaddling clothes in a Bethlehem stable was the fullness of the Trinity. God become human. Incomprehensible. Emmanuel—God with us. Who would have ever thought that God had really meant that literally? Hah! The maker of all that is enters into the creation itself. We never would have done that. Lucifer himself would have never deigned to have anything to do with creation if he could have helped it. It was an elegantly simple approach in retrospect. There was a problem within creation and so God entered the creation to repair the fabric of the cosmos from the inside. But come on. How could we expect such an attack on the way of the world? Why would God care so much? Why would God bother? That question is the one I’ve never gotten my mind around. And yet, it happened. Incomprehensible or not, it happened. Of course, we thought it meant our victory was assured. We were cocky in those days. With God made man, we only had to snuff out the God-Man Jesus. Herod nearly pulled it off too, in killing all the babies around Bethlehem. Weakling, he should have killed every baby they could find anywhere. Didn’t he understand what was at stake? No, of course not. Like most of them, he couldn’t see beyond his own power, his own interests. Herod never saw the larger picture. But we knew in time that Jesus would be brought down. It was as inevitable as the death of any other prophet. Becoming God among humans would naturally mean a lot of people would want him dead before too long. And eventually it happened. On that battered hilltop called Golgotha—the place of a skull—he died without his closest followers, abandoned it seemed by God and man. Oh how we celebrated that Friday. And on the Saturday we thought would never end, we rejoiced. God had played the final hand and we were holding all the aces. By Sunday, we knew the truth. The death of Jesus was not the end. The death of Jesus was the beginning of a counter-revolution against the way of the world—our ways. Jesus’ resurrection turned the whole world upside down. The most degraded of victims became the ultimate victor. We had revolted against God and Heaven. But now with Jesus, the last became the first. The humble was exalted. It was everything he had babbled on about for three years made visible. The counter-revolution had begun. Well, maybe not exactly. The problem was that the counter-revolution really started that night in Bethlehem. A poor mother, a hapless step father, and some grubby shepherds crouched round the maker of heaven and earth. With the birth of that one baby in a stable in Bethlehem was like wrenching loose the cornerstone. Sooner or later our great plans for humanity’s destruction would come crashing down. That baby changed everything. Emmanuel—God with us. Amazing. And God remains with them still. Even now. We’ve already lost. We don’t talk about it. But we know. Now it’s only a matter of time. You’ve read the final book, you’ve seen the last reel. Good wins. Evil loses. Over and over again. But, how could we have known? We never saw it coming.
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