An Advent Reflection

Advent prepares us for interruption.

Not the sentimental kind, but the unsettling kind—the moment when God refuses to stay where we think He belongs. The Incarnation is irrational.

The Creator of the universe enters creation. God takes on flesh.

Kings, shepherds and animals crowd together as “love blooms bright and wild.”

Absorbing myself in the mystery and wonder of the Incarnation—not only in the baby in Bethlehem, but in the faces of those in prison, as Matthew 25 insists—has become fertile ground for a deeper understanding of transcendence. God does not descend into history once and then retreat. He keeps showing himself in places we are trained not to look.

There is a meeting point here: incarnation and incarceration.

The words are not far apart, and neither are the realities they describe. Scripture reading pushes them together. Jesus does not explain captivity away. He names it. He steps into it. He binds himself to it. “When I was in prison, you came to me.” Not symbolically. Personally.

And who is not a prisoner of one kind or another? You don’t need bars and razor wire to know what it is to be trapped.

I find myself caught—willingly—in a revelation. I am not speaking here as a man of opinion, but as a man of experience. My life sits in the tension between two witnesses who should not belong together, and yet do.

On one side, the poet:

This is the irrational season
When love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason
There’d have been no room for the child
— After Annunciation, Madeleine L’Engle

On the other, the prisoner:

Bless you, prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realise that the object of life is not prosperity, as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.
—Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Between Bethlehem and the gulag, between wonder and despair, God makes himself known.

Not in theory, but in flesh. Not at arm’s length, but in the mess.

Redemption is untidy. Scripture never pretends otherwise. There is an old proverb that tells the truth plainly: “When there are no oxen, the manger is clean—but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox.”

God chooses fruitfulness over tidiness. He always has. He did in Genesis, when the Spirit hovered over chaos and spoke light. He does it now in prisons, where flourishing has been stripped away and what remains is honesty.

There, discontent becomes personal. “I don’t like my life, and I want it to change.” Scripture calls that repentance. Add to it a new identity—beloved, forgiven, no longer defined by the last act—and a different story begins to form. Hope edges in. Violence loosens its grip. Forgiveness no longer sounds ridiculous. The fruit of the Spirit appears in soil no one expected to be alive, unless you know how God works.

And it often comes through the smallest things.

A volunteer who keeps turning up.
A handshake that doesn’t flinch and says, “You matter”.
A certificate—the first one ever earned.
A Bible in the language a person dreams in.

This is the quiet offence of the Incarnation. God chooses the small, the hidden, the dismissed—and then declares them decisive. Jesus goes further. He tells us that how we respond to these communities will stand as a measure of nations themselves in judgement. That makes this a high-stakes social reality, according to the one who designed the universe.

But here is the Advent surprise: joy lives here too.

Not surface happiness, but the deep joy of alignment—of discovering that when our heads and hands are placed in the service of the King, we find that He is already there. Not despite the mess, but right in the middle of it.

Advent does not only announce that God has come; it tells us where he is still to be found.

We do not take Jesus into the prison.
We follow Him—and meet Him there.

And he still invites us—quietly, insistently—to keep going.