“That All Be Made One” and There’s No Looking Back
The wolf with the lamb, the leopard with the kid, the calf with the lion, the cow with the bear—and all led by a child. That’s unity beyond anything we can now imagine. In Advent we long for the coming of the Lord, best expressed in Jesus Christ’s own longing for unity “that all may be one” (John 17:21). For what was Jesus longing at the Last Supper? We are beginning to understand that this unity will occur when Christ’s glorified body will thrust us into another phase of creation, a cosmic dimension we call the Second Coming. Some call such unity the God-community in which the whole cosmos is incorporated, for some day God will be “all in all.” On that day the Incarnation, begun 14.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang paving the way for God to take on flesh, will be completed in a whole new Body, the universe centered in Christ. Our minds cannot grasp the fullness of the Incarnation, so we look back on the Bethlehem event. We can grasp the Incarnation as a Baby in a manger, but we can’t keep spending Advent after Advent looking back. Because Christ is the noblest perfection of the universe. the fullness of the Incarnation will be the universe when all is one.
I like your thrust of “we can’t keep spending Advent after Advent looking back.” Although the historical celebration of Christmas is so meaningful , our awareness of the NOW where God continues to come into our lives makes us co-creators of the NEW which is both now and the future. Knowing that we participate in the universe coming to completeness makes every day an “Incarnation” of the Word. Like Mary we pray, “Be it done according to your Word.” That’s exciting!