Reflection

"The Flight into Egypt"

I enjoy this devotional book because John Stott reforms the traditional Sunday School version of the Nativity that exists in my mind into an epic historical account that brings together so many different things and ideas.

I never imagined, for instance, how Jesus and Mary's flight to Exodus was yet another fulfillment of ancient scripture. The comparisons that Stott draws between Israel the nation and Jesus are compelling and powerful.

The last line of the text stuck a chord in me when Stott says that "we can only marvel at the providence of God in this repetition of the pattern of sacred history."

The repetition that God displays is awesome and comforting. And it brought me to think of a powerful passage I read recently in a book called "Orthodoxy" by G.K. Chesterton.

The quote is quite long but I hope you will all enjoy it and reflect on it as much as I did when I first came across it.
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"I speak here only of an emotion, and of an emotion at once stubborn and subtle.

But the repetition in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again.

The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood. The sun would make me see him if he rose a thousand times. The recurrences of the universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began to see an idea...

The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his leg rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life.

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, 'Do it again;' and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead.

For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.
But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.

It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately , but has never got tired of making them.

...The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore...

It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy;
for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

..I had always believed the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician.

And this pointed a profound emotion always present and sub-conscious; that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose, there is a person.

I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller."

-G.K. Chesterton