God Has Looked With Favor

Olenka

A few years ago,  George Saunders released a fabulous book-version of his acclaimed Syracuse short fiction course titled A Swim In a Pond In the Rain. In it, he comments on the stories of several great Russian writers — Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Nicolai Gogol — and observes what makes them compelling literature.

One of the stories Saunders gives a “close read” to is Anton Chekhov’s short story “The Darling,” which follows the life of a woman named Olenka. She’s a lovable, dysfunctional person, and over the course of the story, she makes some tragic decisions in love. In his commentary, Saunders notices how the reader, even while watching Olenka’s shortcomings and missteps, yet cares for her. And in so doing, he says something striking:

I feel about Olenka the way I think God might. I know so much about her. Nothing has been hidden from me. It’s rare, in the real world, that I get to know someone so completely… And look at that: the more I know about her, the less inclined I feel to pass a too-harsh or premature judgment. Some essential mercy in me has been switched on. What God has going for him that we don’t is infinite information. Maybe that’s why he’s able to, supposedly, love us so much.

Saunders’ point is that, as the reader, we have infinite information, an omniscient view of Olenka’s life — and our response is compassion, not condescension. In the same way, God sees us all the way down, inside and out, beginning to end — and God’s response is mercy, grace, favor. 

Magnificat

I’ve thought about Saunders and Olenka often as I’ve been praying Mary’s outburst of praise — the Magnificat — this Advent. In Luke 1, Mary receives the news that she — an unwed, poor teenager — would bear the long-promised King of the world, and hurries to celebrate with her aged relative Elizabeth. Mary, Elizabeth, and the baby boys in their wombs share a moment of intra-uterine recognition, and then Mary, a trimester pregnant with God’s great act of rescue, breaks into song:

My soul magnifies the Lord, 
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, 
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant… (Luke 1.46-47)

“God has looked at me with favor”. The biblical scholar Raymond Brown says that Mary, in Luke’s gospel, becomes the very first Christian — she is the first person to hear and respond to the news of Jesus’ coming, and so is a guide for us in receiving and experiencing the Christmas Gospel. And the arrival of Jesus, Mary sings, means that the God, who sees us at our best and worst, looks at us with favor.

This note of favor comes through again and again in Luke’s account of Jesus’ beginnings:

• Elizabeth: “This is what the Lord has done for me when he looked favorably on me…” (1.25)
• Gabriel: “Greetings, favored one!” (1.28)
• Gabriel, again: “You have found favor with God.” (1.30)
• Mary: “[God] has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant…” (1.48)
• Zechariah: “[The Lord God] has looked favorably on his people…” (1.68)
• Angels: “…peace on earth among those whom [God] favors!” (2.14)
• Luke, about the child Jesus: “the favor of God was upon him.” (2.40)

Luke wants us, I think, to have Mary’s exuberant song ringing in our ears as we watch the story of Jesus unfold. Luke wants us to watch Jesus teach God’s truth, fill empty stomachs, heal sick bodies, welcome all the wrong people to his table and his company, suffer, breathe his last on a Roman cross, rise, from the grave, and realize: the Mighty One is doing all these great things. . .for me. This is how much God favors me. God looks at me with favor.

The Hardest Thing

Martin Luther, in one of his Christmas sermons, says of the staggering mystery of Christmas, “This is for us the hardest point, not so much to believe that [Jesus] is the son of the Virgin and God himself, as to believe that this Son of God is ours.”

I think Luther is on to something. I wonder if that’s the hardest pill to swallow for a lot of people: not that the Almighty could pull off a miracle like the virgin birth, or even that one particularly controversial Jewish rabbi somehow shows us the face of the invisible Creator. It’s that God would do all this for us, for you, for me. Lowly, dysfunctional people like Olenka and Mary and you and me. That in Christ, God could be ours. But the Christmas Gospel of the nail-scarred Lord of the world, who came and who is coming again, insists: the God who sees you all the way to the bottom looks at you with favor.