Nothing Happens for the First Time

First Advent: Luke 1.1-25

In his clinical memoir, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the late neurologist Oliver Sacks writes about a patient named Jimmie G, a man who is charming, intelligent, and memoryless. Over and over without ceasing, after only a few moments, Jimmie G's memory became like a slate wiped clean. Despite his salt-and-pepper hair, Jimmie existed as a perpetual nineteen year old GI.

For Jimmie, everything always happened for the first time.

Jimmie was forever meeting his doctors and fellow patients as though for the first time, and always speaking of the distant past in the present tense. And over and over, every day, Jimmie would look out the window or see a color television screen or hear a bit of news and realize the world was not as he thought it.

“Jesus Christ,” he'd whisper every time with the recognition.

“Christ, what's going on? What's happened to me? Is this a nightmare?”

Then a moment later, he would forget again.

And the next thing to happen to him would happen for the first time.

The inconstancy of Jimmie G's memory made him incapable of doing the simplest of tasks, Oliver Sacks writes. A skilled typist from his submarine training, Jimmie could punch out a paragraph's worth of copy only to find himself staring blankly at the typewriter a moment later. “One tended to speak of Jimmie instinctively as a spiritual casualty, a lost soul,” Oliver Sacks writes, “Was it possible, I wondered, for a man to be de-souled by a disease? “Do you think Jimmie G has a soul?” I once asked the nuns who cared for Jimmie. They were outraged by my question, but could see why I asked it. “Watch Jimmie in chapel,” they said. “Watch Jimmie in chapel at communion and judge for yourself.”

Though he himself was not a believer of any kind, Dr. Sacks heeded the sister's advice and went to worship to observe Jimmie G in praise and adoration. Before the altar, beholding God in loaf and cup, the doctor discovered that here was one place where not everything happened to Jimmie G for the first time.

Sacks writes:

“I was moved, profoundly moved and impressed because I saw here an intensity and steadiness of attention and concentration that I had never seen before in Jimmie or conceived him capable of. I watched him kneel and take the sacrament on his tongue, and I could not doubt the fullness and totality of communion, the perfect alignment of his spirit with the Spirit.

Fully, intensely, quietly, in the quietude of absolute concentration, Jimmie entered and partook of holy communion. He was wholly held, absorbed by a feeling. There was no forgetting, no disease then, nor did it seem possible or imaginable that there should be, for he was no longer at the mercy of a faulty and fallible mechanism, but he was absorbed in an act, a doing of his whole being, a continuity and unity so seamless it could not permit any break.”

As Christians, we are accustomed to thinking of ourselves and our fellow believers according to the (self-justifying) slogan simul iustus et peccator— simultaneously righteous and a sinner. We speak of sin as if though it’s a necessary predicate of the human situation. An odd believer like Jimmie G, therefore, may be the best analogue for the surprising possibility with which St. Luke opens his prologue to what St. Paul calls “the most praiseworthy” of the Gospels. In the purity of his motives, in his forgetting of the sins trespassed against him, and in the unity of his intentions with his actions, Jimmie G is not unlike the elderly, barren, soon-to-be-parents of John the Baptist.

According to the evangelist, Elizabeth and Zechariah “were both righteous.”

Righteous not in the public square.

Righteous not in their neighbors’s eyes.

Righteous not in their own self-estimation.

Elizabeth and Zechariah were righteous before God, Luke reports, “walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the LORD.” They were righteous while not being, simultaneously, sinners. In fact, Luke adds, they were “blameless” before the LORD. As Oliver Sacks describes his patient’s predicament, "Jimmie both was and wasn’t aware of this deep, tragic loss in himself, loss of himself. If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.”

The news that any person not named Jesus of Nazareth could be deemed both righteous and blameless before God makes me feel like Jimmie G, like I’m missing a part of me less tangible than a phantom arm or a severed leg— an amputated self who knows how not to sin.

Yet Zechariah and Elizabeth are not unique.

Franciscan exegetes in the Middle Ages often remarked upon scripture, “Nothing happens for the first time.” By “nothing happens for the first time” the medieval interpreters meant that events of the gospel are presaged by events with messianic portent in the Old Testament— typology, scholars call it. In particular, they referred to the way in which Elizabeth’s and Zechariah’s old age echo the unlikely child God gives to Abraham and Sarah, how Zechariah reacts to the angel of the LORD in the temple just like Isaiah had once fearfully responded, and how Elizabeth’s child is a type of the prophet-priest born as an answer to Hannah’s prayer. And when he’s grown, Elizabeth’s son, in both manner and appearance, will elicit comparisons to Elijah the Troubler of Israel.

Nothing happens for the first time.

Another recurrent feature in Luke’s prologue is the elderly couple’s righteousness under the law and blamelessness before the LORD.

Zechariah and Elizabeth are not the first instance of God’s people leading faithful, sinless lives.

According to the Book of Genesis, for example, "Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation, who walked with God.” Job furthermore was “perfect and upright, who feared the LORD, and eschewed evil.”

Nothing happens for the first time.

Zechariah, from the Order of Abijah, is one of approximately eighteen thousand priests set apart for service in the temple. Do you suppose Luke would have us conclude that he alone is righteous and without sin? Before you answer, recall how Matthew in his Gospel likewise describes Joseph of Galilee as a tsadiq, a righteous man. Mary meanwhile is full of grace, highly favored. The Bride of the fruit of Mary’s womb is also without sin. As Paul writes to the Ephesians, the Lord Jesus presented (past tense) to himself “a glorious church which had no stain of sin so that she might be holy and blameless.”

Nothing happens for the first time, “And Zechariah and Elizabeth were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of God, and before the Lord blameless.”

Preaching on this passage not long after Luke first recorded it, the ancient church father Origen gripes:

“People who want to offer an excuse for their sins claim that no one is without sin. They appeal to the testimony of Job, where scripture says, “No one is clean from filth, not even if his life upon the earth has been only one day long. His months can be numbered. But they only mouth the words of this verse and are wholly ignorant of its meaning. We shall answer them briefly. “To be without sin” has two meanings in scripture. One is never to have sinned at all; the other is to have ceased sinning. If they say that the phrase “to be without sin” describes someone who has never sinned at all, then we agree that no one is without sin. All of us have sinned at some time, even though we might have become virtuous afterwards. But, if they take the phrase “no one is without sin” as denying that anyone, after he has sinned, can return to the practice of virtues and never sin again, then their opinion is wrong. For, it can happen that someone who has previously sinned can stop sinning and be said to be “without sin.”

If it is possible to live a sinless life, if it is possible to achieve righteousness under the law and blamelessness before the LORD, if God’s people prior to the incarnation lived without sin, if indeed members of Christ’s own family did so, then why does Jesus come?

If it is possible to live a sinless life, then why does Jesus come?

Very often we speak as though the purpose of Christmas is the crucifixion, that Christ’s Nativity is for his Passion, that the Son took on flesh in order for the Father to forgive the sins of humanity.

Straightforwardly, this is nonsense.

After all, if Jesus is born in order to die for our sins, then according to the scriptures there are some in Israel for whom God did not need to become incarnate, including Mary and Joseph, Zechariah and Elizabeth, Noah and Job and even David. And the Father no more needs someone to die in order to forgive sins than you do; in fact, Jesus shows up on the scene announcing the pardon of God for sinners. The absolution is what gets Jesus killed!

Nothing happens for the first time. The Father forgave sinners long before Good Friday. And some of those forgiven sinners— Zechariah, Elizabeth, et al— thereupon managed to live righteously according to the law and blameless in the eyes of the LORD. They needed not Christ’s righteousness reckoned to them. Thus, if Jesus came to die for sinners then, contrary to what he tells Nicodemus in the dead of night, Christ did not come for the whole world. If he is born to die, then he comes for some but not for all.

Just so—

The Son condescends into Mary’s womb for reasons other than the Fall.

Whether we realize it or not, we affirm as much every time we utter the LORD’s proper name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. By confessing God’s triune identity, we profess that God's decision to be with us in Jesus Christ is eternal, prior to creation and before the Fall, preexistent as the Son. And thus God’s decision to be God with us is antecedent to God's determination to be for us on the cross.

The with comes before the for.

Therefore, the with takes precedence over the for.

It's true that Jesus saves us. It's true that his death and resurrection reconcile God's creation. It's true that through him our sins are forgiven, but that's not why he comes. The answer is so straightforward it's hiding in plain sight. God comes to us in Jesus because God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; that is, from before the foundation of the world, God elected not to be God without us. Or as Jonathan Edwards liked to say, the Father is bent on his Son having a Bride and celebrating their love in the Spirit.

No matter what transpired in paradise, Jesus comes to be with us at Christmas because he was always going to come. The incarnation only unveils what was true from before the Big Bang. What we unwrap at Christmas isn't simply a rescue package, but an even deeper mystery. The mystery that the Nativity is an event that God has set on his calendar before God even made the creature called time. Even if there had been no need for a cross, there still would have been a creche because God has elected to be no other God than Emmanuel. God with us.

This what we affirm in the creed when we say that Christ is the one “by whom all things were made.” This what the first Christian sang in the hymn that Paul quotes in his letter to the Colossians, that Christ is “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. All things have been created through him and for him.”

He was before was was.

He is back behind yesterday.

Nothing ever happens for the first time— not even the LORD’s love for you.

Therefore, he has always had more in mind for you than pardon.

In other words— pay attention, this could not be more important:

• Jesus is not made for us.

• We are made for him.

• You were born for him.

You are the one with whom the triune God wants to share his life. At Christmas then, you are the gift God gives to himself. You— unimpressive, bewildered, petty, and yes sinful you— are the gift the LORD presents to himself. Before the stars were hung in the sky, before Adam fell or Israel's love failed, the Father’s deepest and abiding desire is welcome his Son’s Bride into the triune life.

As Oliver Sacks recalls the time of year, “it was around Christmas” when he first watched Jimmie G rapt in inexplicably sustained wonder and obedience.

Sacks writes:

“There in worship, Jimmie existed in perfect alignment of the present with the future, of the moment with the End. Seeing Jimmie in chapel before the loaf that is God’s body and the cup that is his blood, it opened my eyes to another realm to which the soul is called. Another realm to which the soul is called.”

Nothing ever happens for the first time.

The neurologist first witnessed his allegedly broken patient in perfect loving, awestruck communion with his Maker— week after week he saw them together— in 1975. Oliver Sacks saw more than Jimmie G, his empty memory filled by vibrant fellowship with God.

The doctor saw your destiny.

One day you will be as whole as Jimmie G, lost in wonder, love, and praise.

It’s too good to believe.

Just so—

It is good that you need no more proof than Luke’s news that Zechariah and Elizabeth were righteous according to the law and blameless before God.