A Prayer for the Fourth Sunday of Advent

Dear Jesus,

In the beginning, you made us a little lower than the angels. But in the middle, you lowered yourself. You did what no one had ever done before, neither Creator nor creature: you chose to be born. You poured out the independence from your sovereignty. You subtracted the invincibility from your immortality. And from your omnipotence, you set aside the grandeur. 

You were making room for your earthly life and death. You were making yourself small so that your infinite love would appear lifesize to us. You were lowering yourself so that it would be right there in front of us: your heart. 

Then, with a newborn’s racing pulse, you came to us, a little lower than the angels and immeasurably above the angels. What must the heralds of your birth have thought? It’s hard to imagine that they, who had only ever run errands between heaven and earth, were any less gobsmacked than the shepherds, hard to imagine that Gabriel was less astonished by his announcement than Mary. In fact, it would make sense—wouldn’t it?—if the angels wondered why we were so dear to you.

Maybe we don’t wonder enough at how dear to you we are. So dear that you said yes to taking on flesh and blood, knowing what we would do to your body. After all, whatever you took from your omniscience to become one of us, you knew you were saying yes not just to being born with an infant’s tiny, impotent fists but to having your hands nailed to a cross. You knew we would betray you. You knew we’d stop your heart.

Just as you know now how much lower than the angels we have it in us to go. Yet you insist on loving us. So, dear Jesus, who loved us enough to change—to be born and to die and to be raised from the dead—change us, too. Subtract from us everything that crowds out love. Set aside our vanity and pour out our selfishness. Make space for us, too, to be awed by your birth, and lend us the praise of stymied angels. Amen.

Header photo by Adele Morris on Unsplash