The Third Wednesday in Advent -- Brennan Manning

A Reflection on Brennan Manning’s Shipwrecked at the Stable (pp. 184-200)

Jesus said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners” (Mk 2:17). The righteous cannot recognize Christ, because they believe they are just fine on their own and are pretending they are not “shipwrecked,” to us Brennan Manning’s phrase; they are unaware of their predicament and thus blind to the News which addresses it. 

But the sinners and outcasts, those who know they are shipwrecked, take to Christ immediately. They are drawn to the stable, and will not leave, because having been lost, they now can see in the eyes of the infant God that they have been found. This Child is whom they have been waiting for!

The message of the Incarnation is good news for us, Manning insists, not only because it addresses our plight, but also because it comes wholly from outside of ourselves. It is not something we could have discovered, invented, or imagined. It is news. It arrives from beyond the boundaries of our selves, beyond all we know. It is news from across the seas to the shipwrecked, from the other side of the unbridgeable gulf between humans and God. 

In a sense, then, says Manning, the main work of Advent is to fully acknowledge our plight: to know ourselves as shipwrecked. Imagine for a moment that you are that four-year-old child who has been separated from his mother in a sprawling shopping mall during the Christmas rush. You can’t see her anywhere. You scream her name, but no one answers. You are surrounded only by strangers, whizzing by, all indifferent to your plight and consumed by their own frantic (if misguided) agendas. The intensity of desire that child feels in his heart for reunion with his mother, knowing that he is lost and that only she can save him, is the same intensity of desire, Manning contends, we should feel during Advent.

“I believe that the single most important consideration during the sacred season of Advent is intensity of desire. Paraphrasing the late Abraham Heschel, ‘Jesus Christ is of no importance unless he is of supreme importance.’ An intense inner desire is already the sign of his presence in our hearts.” (197)


Brennan Manning (1934-2013) was a Franciscan priest in his early life, but left religious orders to become a writer and speaker. He became widely influential in many evangelical Christian circles.

Comments

  1. graceDecember 20, 2017 at 6:09 AM

    I am struck that Manning says the message of the incarnation comes from wholly outside ourselves. That is wonderful, almost unbelievable and scarey...like Underhill's understanding of the Epiphany as the revelation of the supernatural in our human lives. (3rd Monday in Advent).

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