IMMANUEL!

IMMANUEL !

Love is everything!

But the best and most finest moment of love is known as sacrifice.

A friend of mine – a beautiful girl – narrated to me a version of her own experience of the “October Rush” thing on entering the University of Calabar in 1990. One nice looking and intelligent Akwa-Ibom boy who incidentally was also a new student like herself approached her for friendship and kept on disturbing her to the point of embarrassment. On this fateful day they had lecture on one of the General Courses and in a big hall, this guy came to her in the midst of three of her other friends while she was on her way to the lecture hall and pleaded with one of the friends to please teach him how to say “I love you in Igbo”. My friend intervened abruptly and told the boy that the way to say “I love you” in Igbo is “Abu m onye apari”, that is, “I am very foolish”- a manifest abuse and inversion of the original statement. Being a foreigner to Igbo Language but believing that he had gotten the true translation, the boy carefully memorized this Igbo translation of “I love you” which he had learnt from his would-be lover over and over again and then went away. My friend said she happened to be sitting at the front row during the lecture on the General Course. And as the lecture was going on and while the lecturer was seated at one of the seats in the back row  lecturing, the boy stood up from where he sat, came around to the front row seat where she herself was seated and, in a loud voice that got the entire class distracted and embarrassed, proclaimed aloud to my friend saying “….(name withheld) Abu m Onye Apari”. The whole class filled with Igbo speaking students went into frenzy with laughter. And from that day, his name became “Onye Apari” – the fool.

Let’s leave that story here. But it suffices to observe that love can sometimes make us appear foolish. 

This episode clearly captures the paradox associated with the incarnation as God came searching for us, and goes ahead to raise the necessary question that has engaged exegetes and theologians alike: Why the God-Man? What is it that God wanted or what was He looking for that prompted him to squeeze himself and allowed the whole content of divinity be accommodated unreservedly in the person of the Son of Mary? If there is anything that looks very foolish in human history, it is the event of the incarnation. And yet it did not end here. There is, very much latter to follow, the further expedition into the Cross and the consummation of this Cross by the institution of the Eucharist.

Sacrifice has the capacity to reduce, and most often may require that the greatest of all men be reduced to the least of al; the richest to a pauper and the most handsome to the ugliest. Yet sacrifice is not about the perpetual paralysis of vital human accomplishments incurred and imposed through the penal process but rather a positive disposition of love to the hard realities that must necessarily be confronted and cannot but be confronted in all circumstances of its (love) own existence.

Therefore, a centrifugal reductionism incurred by the One Reality that is at once Good and Beautiful as a direct consequence of a love action is not and must not be confused with the other type accomplished by sin. The former is a product of radical creative ingenuity freely accomplished in joy, faith and hope, the later is a product of infamy accomplished in disobedience, acute misery and poverty of initiative. The former is a rite of passage through the eyes of a needle undertaking by a camel while the latter is a truck of baggage forcing itself through into the King’s palace in a very violent way. The former is a miracle which nourishes life. The latter is about death and total annihilation.

A rite of passage? Yes! The Incarnation is the take-off site of a divinely instituted rite of passage or event in which God “happened” to humanity and led her by hand - confronting and dealing deadly blows to extremists and treasury looters - as she moves through the slavery of sin and the imprisonment of death to the fullness of life and power that are hers by grace.

In and through the Incarnation as an event, God in all his omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence took a radical decision in love and resolved to assume the nature of man – that is, he lent himself to man’s understanding in a limitless way even as he remains the Absolute Mystery – without in the least loosing his own nature as God or having both (the divine nature and the human nature) become confused in the personal form they came to assume in the person of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. What a miracle!

From generation to generation, humanity has groaned in the very act of giving birth. It is very amazing, and indeed something worthy of our acknowledgement that the burden of motherhood for a new humanity and the pain of child bearing or the power of bringing forth a new humanity fell on the shoulders of an itinerant village girl called Mary. Efforts expended in discerning and appreciating the role of Mary and the issues and circumstances that define her person pursuant to their practical application in our own daily lives are not a waste because the life and example of this woman constitute the most adequate response to the God that “dwells among us”. Her mastery of the terrain of salvation is legendary and has never been matched by any other. In this way, all peoples who belong to God are equally children of Mary – consciously or unconsciously.

Any person who desires to live meaningfully and purposefully must seek God and must be content to find him in Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the Son of Mary and Joseph. The initial outburst of bias and prejudice “Nazareth! Can anything good come from Nazareth?” of Nathaniel in response to the divine invitation which was extended to him through Philip  will always be there but does it have the power to change anything? Is it not rather an act of impunity questioning the obvious and spreading the disease of blindness around one’s own habitations?

Anybody who desires to live this life of God brought by the new King and live it to its fullest must resolve to remain close to Mary the Mother of Jesus Christ and must take an extra step of making her into a personal mother. While an immediate abrogation of the portfolio of bias and prejudice won Nathaniel a special place in the Kingdom, doing away with every trappings of ambition to embrace a simple vocation of love and service won John the greatest possession – a Mother. He shared the same mother with his Lord and Master. And living with her under the same roof, he learnt a lot that were seldom thought in senior classrooms of the Apostolic College. John graduated into the best and most important theologian in the history of Christendom. 

If Adam was the name of the old but fallen humanity, then Jesus Christ of Nazareth is the name of the new humanity. And if Eve was the mother of the old but fallen humanity, then Mary is the mother of the new humanity.

And having to discover that, historically, this much advertised virgin and her son are the Blessed Virgin Mary the wife of Joseph and Jesus Christ of Nazareth respectively sets a new task before us and challenges us to go out in search of them. The wise man – every wise man or woman be he a traditionalist, a mason or an atheist – must abandon every thing, discard every other attraction and shun every distraction and be resolved to follow the star of destiny to Bethlehem.

Therefore, if on this day of Christmas there is a young mother and a baby who is God, then every human being – both those before and those after, the young and old – must learn to accept and appreciate that he/she is a baby in need of the tender and loving care of the itinerant village mother called the Blessed Virgin Mary. Which child ever wants to be motherless?

God is the only King! But are there other Kings on earth despite the fact that there is indeed only one King – Jesus Christ of Nazareth? And if the mother of those Kings are indeed real, then Mary is not only the Mother of the People of God, She is also the Mother of God (Theotokos). And can a mother give birth to a King without herself being a Queen or a Princess?

Are there children of God in Nigeria? If there are, then Mary is also the Queen f Nigeria.
And if Jesus Christ is the first and the last, the beginning and end – even as President Goodlck Ebele Jonathan is the Number One citizen of Nigeria, then there is no confusion or rivalry between Nigeria’s 1^st Lady Mrs Patience Jonathan and the Queen of Nigeria, the Blessed Virgin Mary

If David was humble enough to listen to Nathan in 2^nd Samuel chapter 7,President Goodluck Jonathan must swallow his pride and go to Abeokuta in search of former president Mathew Olusegun Obasanjo. And if Dame Patience Jonathan - as opposed to and greatly distanced from Her Imperial Majesty Patience Jonathan which is the hand work of morticians and undertakers in the national cemetery called Aso rock where her loving husband is depicted as occupying a Chair belonging to a dead man - is a mother, then she should follow the example of the woman called mary and hearken to the will of God for her life.

To be direct, the Nigerian 1^st Lady should go to visit a crib in search of a friend and a sister whose name is Mary, Queen and Patroness of Nigeria. And while there, she should do well to reflect on the meaning of victory and power in the contemporary political experience. To get this assignment aright is what it takes for the Register of Death in hrer custody be reduced to dust and ashes.

FROM THE PROPHETIC DESK AT THE MARYSROSE, WE SAY MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR IN ADVANCE TO THE PEOPLE OF GOD IN NIGERIA