Can you remember the last time you felt properly lost? Not so much the moment where you're stuck in an intersection waiting for the Maps app to recalculate your position. I mean the type of lost where all your options seem exhausted and the way back home feels uncertain?
I remember a family vacation a few years ago, we got a flat tire on a very remote road (two hours drive from the nearest intersection), with no spare tire to speak of. As you might have guessed, we made it back home safely, but I was left with a feeling I try hard not to forget. In those moments I remember feeling a pure and human sense of need, and an urgent uncertainty for my future. One I know Jesus has experienced too.

During Advent, we take time to reflect on what it means for Jesus to dwell with us, take up our pains, strivings, sorrows, and ultimately our sin. How best to describe it is a mystery that has engaged the church and her greatest minds for centuries. What did it mean for God to be born a human? What of our life could God experience first hand?

Matthew recounts for us a jealous and hateful Herod, who swelled up against the prophecies confirmed of a king born in Bethlehem. Herod sought to bring Jesus and the threat he posed to Herod's reign to an end, so in a fashion similar to another Biblical bad ruler, he orders all young boys to be killed. God sends an angel to warn Joseph to take Mary, the Child, and go, back to Egypt. We could talk about the ways Matthew is showing us that Jesus is the better Moses, the promised liberator, but there's a different mystery that I would like to sit with for a moment.

God fled.

Jesus, the Son of God, carried by his parents, helpless, fled to escape a dangerous king who sought his life. He was wrapped up by hands He fashioned, placed on the back of an animal He created, rushed across desert sands He could number, to escape soldiers and servants who bore His very image, in whom was His very breath. In Jesus God made himself so vulnerable that he became helpless to every force in his own creation.
He humbled Himself to our level, in every way. God himself, helpless in the desert
He held nothing back for himself, but surrendered completely to be made like us. Even our needs in their most basic and primitive form have been experienced by Almighty God.

How remarkable! Creator made himself the victim, and suffered the full force of sin, by the very hands He created. How incredible must His love for you and for I be, that he left every comfort of Heaven behind, and traded it in for our pain!

This Advent season I invite you to reflect on the profound mystery that God in Jesus shared every part of the human experience, and I pray your understanding of the depths of His love might grow again and again.