BitterSweetLife

Heaven's Loss Was Our Gain


I wonder if the angels already knew. Certainly they must have guessed? For how else could a man ever leave this dying earth, even if he was the Son of God? The rustics in the fields felt, plain and simple, a fiery terror, and then—miraculous reversal!—a heraldic joy that put wings on their heels, gave them lighter feet than Hermes ever had. Decades of bone-bruising camps and flesh-numbing winds fell away like dirty wool at shearing.

They had burning news, a colossal scoop; they were God-ordained paparazzi of the ancient world. No one before or after them would have a story this big dumped in their ragged laps, and they knew it. Once they brushed the dust off their faces and picked the sandburs from of their beards, the shepherds rushed off.

For the angels it was different.

For once, they stayed behind—or if they traveled overhead, invisible, they were a degree removed from the shortsighted hurry of human joy. The angels could not ignore the corridor of years that stretched away from the Bethlehem epicenter. Did they grasp the fullness of the Father’s plan? Or were they left in the half-light of revelation, baffled by causation and conjecture?

Whatever else they knew, they could not ignore the fact that no one arrives here, in this Vegas of the universe, without paying out more than they can afford. It is a painful understatement to say that No one on earth gets undiluted joy. And now Jesus, who they loved, was here, and in men’s clothing. It could not be taken off without a long day’s dying, without the gradual erosion of a life.

The angels smiled and sang. They rode the wind, they banked over the shepherds, jumping into visibility with a roar, and their joy made the icy pastures a roaring, floodlit stadium. But behind the blazing news was the worshipful, baffled grief of servants who wondered why their Master took this love for Adam’s race to such extremities.

They sang and they smiled. They marveled and whispered, and, quietly, they wept.