The Divine Protagonist

Listening to a podcast recently, I was taken in as the host mentioned the great

C.S. Lewis and what he once wrote. I had long forgotten this and it stirred my

soul this Advent season. While I can’t quote verbatim, catch the gist of it here:

Hamlet will never meet Shakespeare. Shakespeare, on the other hand, knows

Hamlet intimately. He knows his thought patterns, the steps he will and does

take, his moods, his frustrations, his desires and his complete personality. But

Hamlet will never meet Shakespeare; he can’t be removed from the essence of

the page and meet the author who created him. But God has found a way to

change all of that and did something so extraordinary as He put on human flesh

and actually became one of us.

In the person of Jesus, we find all of God and all of our humanity. He is and

always will be the Divine Protagonist in the creation story. If that doesn’t cause

you to pause this Advent, then perhaps you have allowed the commercialism of

Christmas to cloud the extraordinary reality of this truth. Jesus is both the author

and the protagonist – this is stunning! This is so humbling.

As we walk into Christmas, let me encourage you to reflect deeply on the fact that

God loved us enough to become one of us, so we could one day not just know OF

Him, but know Him face to face.

Have a blessed Christ – mas!

Scott E. Ireland