Sickness and Happiness
It may have happened to you: a flight to visit people you want to see, but when you get there you are laid low with sickness. In Chicago for an academic conference, I saw an old friend sitting, alone and masked, in the back of the room. She had arrived at the conference a couple of days before, but this was her first time out of her hotel room. It was the last session of the conference; she was feeling better only as it was coming to an end. Along with many others, I was glad to see her.
More often, I suppose, it happens with families. You haven’t seen each other since maybe last Christmas, but just before you arrived a child got a fever and is now sleeping it off; over the next few days this heavy tiredness comes over first one parent then the other. It was hardly the Christmas visit you had anticipated, and everyone is sorry for that.
But as you leave, it comes to you: even with sickness, it is still Christmas.
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When the Word of God took on our humanity, he took on our vulnerability to disease. The gospels never record Jesus having a sore throat, but it was something that could have happened to him. The gospels do record him being tired and weary—”the Son of Man has no place to lay his head”—even as they also record him staying awake through the night in prayer. Yes, Jesus had command over disease, yet it is impossible to imagine him using that power for his own comfort. When passersby mocked him on the cross, telling him to come down if he really were the Son of God, they were right in this: he could have come down. But he did not use his own authority to preserve himself from death.
Vulnerability is the point of being a baby, of lying in a manger, of needing to nurse and all the rest. If, dear reader, yours was a Christmas that fell short of expectations, a Christmas interrupted by sickness, it was still Christmas. Jesus has identified himself with everything that is human, and he is one with us throughout our lives, both when our lives unfold as expected and also when they do not.
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Out & About. Thus Sunday (Jan. 14) I am to preach at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas at the 9 and 11:15 a.m. Eucharists. That evening at 5 p.m., also at St. Matthew’s, I will lead a discussion of J. F. Powers’s novel, Morte d’Urban. Anyone who reads the book is welcome to the discussion; others are welcome to come and listen. We meet in the Great Hall: from the parking lot, walk around the church for the entrance. The conversation ends at 6:30.