The Central Light: The Ordinary Omnipotence of Christmas
After all our careful counting of candles and marking of weeks, Christmas arrives with a magnificent absurdity that would have ruined any sensible religion. For here, in the center of our Advent wreath, we light a final candle that makes nonsense of all our preparations. It is rather like spending months planning a royal banquet only to find that the king has decided to eat in the kitchen, or carefully crafting a throne only to find that God prefers a manger.
We have lit four candles, each in its proper time and order, and now we light one that suggests that time and order themselves have been thrown into glorious confusion. For this is the candle that represents Christ Himself, and Christ has the peculiar habit of being both the thing we wait for and the thing that has always been here, both the God who comes and the God who has never left, both the end of our waiting and the reason we could wait at all.
The modern mind (which has somehow managed to make even infinity boring) thinks of Christ's coming as a sort of divine scheduling, as if God had simply checked his calendar and found December 25th convenient. But the coming we celebrate with this candle is nothing so tame. It is more like the arrival of spring in the midst of winter, or dawn breaking at midnight, or perhaps most accurately, like life suddenly appearing in a tomb. It is, in other words, not the sort of arrival that fits into our categories but the sort that transforms them entirely.
Consider how this candle sits in the center of our wreath. We might say that Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love have been circling around it all along, like planets around a sun they couldn't quite see, or like characters in a story looking for their author. Each of these great virtues finds its meaning only here, in this center that is both the beginning and the end of all our Advent journeys. We have been like people walking around a house looking for the front door, only to discover that we've been inside all along.
And here we stumble upon the great secret of Christmas, which is that it is both the most extraordinary and the most ordinary thing that has ever happened. The coming of Christ is at once the most spectacular miracle and the most natural event in human history, rather like a flower blooming or a child being born - which is, of course, exactly what it was. It is as ordinary as flesh and as extraordinary as God, as common as straw and as rare as infinity.
This explains the rather startling fact that the people who were most prepared for Christ's coming missed it entirely, while those who were entirely unprepared recognized Him at once. The scholars had their scrolls and the priests had their prophecies, but it was shepherds and foreigners who had eyes to see God in a baby. They were not hindered by knowing too well what they were looking for. They had the tremendous advantage of being able to be surprised.
As we light this Christ candle, we are doing something far more dangerous than we usually imagine. We are not simply completing a set or finishing a tradition. We are declaring that the Light of the World chooses to appear as one small flame among many, that the Maker of the Stars is content to be a star himself, that the Author of Life prefers to become a character in His own story. We are, in fact, celebrating the sort of thing that would ruin any sensible religion - which is precisely why Christianity is not a sensible religion but a true one.
For this center candle reminds us that God's answer to all our Advent waiting was not to appear in power but in powerlessness, not in majesty but in humility, not in the extraordinary but in the ordinary. The Light we have been seeking turns out to be not a blast of glory but a baby's face in the dark. The God we have been preparing for arrives not in spite of our unpreparedness but in the midst of it, not because of our worthiness but despite our unworthiness.
And perhaps this is the final and greatest paradox of our Advent journey - that after all our careful preparations and mindful waiting, after all our lighting of candles and keeping of time, we discover that God's arrival among us is both more ordinary and more extraordinary than anything we could have prepared for. The Christ candle burns neither more nor less brightly than the others, and yet it changes everything. It is simply one more light in our wreath, and yet it is the light by which all other lights are lit.
As we celebrate Christmas, we are not merely remembering a historical event or completing a liturgical cycle. We are declaring that the ordinary has become extraordinary without ceasing to be ordinary, that God has become human without ceasing to be God, that time has been invaded by eternity without ceasing to be time. We are celebrating the sort of miracle that does not interrupt the natural order but fulfills it, the sort of divine appearance that does not destroy the human but completes it.
This center candle burns for the Christ who is both the end of our Advent waiting and the beginning of a new kind of waiting altogether. For now we wait not in darkness but in light, not in ignorance but in knowledge, not in doubt but in faith. We wait as people who know that the Light has come and is coming and will come again, that every ordinary moment is full of extraordinary glory, that every human face might suddenly become for us the face of Christ.
And if this seems impossible - well, that is precisely what Christmas is about. For the God who could become a baby can become anything, and the Light that could shine in a stable can shine anywhere. The Christ candle burns to remind us that there is no place so ordinary that it cannot become extraordinary, no moment so common that it cannot become sacred, no life so simple that it cannot become divine. This is the miracle of Christmas, and it is still happening, here and now, as ordinary as candlelight and as extraordinary as God with us.
-The Seeker's Quill
