The Size of an Olive

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Last night, my niece, Elsie, showed me a picture of what her new baby brother or sister might look like in the womb. It is just nine weeks tiny, with black eyes and hands and feet poking their way outward.

“The baby is the size of an olive,” Elsie said. 

I tried to imagine holding a green olive in my hand, fumbling desperately to shelter and not drop it. For something so lasting and precious, I thought, a life sure starts out small. At some point, we were all the size of an olive, a kidney bean, a fig, a turnip. 

I realize this is true of many things: forest fires were first a spark, civilizations were a stone, Grizzly bears were cubs, ancient forests were a few trees, and even olive trees themselves began with a seed. In Scripture, God often does his work through small things, and maybe the greatest example is the Advent story. The narrative of Christ’s coming is littered with little things: a rural town, a government census, new parents, a full inn, a field of sheep, a baby. 

In Sunday School a few weeks ago, Don said that maybe God doesn’t always work in mysterious ways. He was teaching on a Psalm when David was hiding in a cave from Saul, and Don said that the cave itself was a grace of God. Grace does not always fall out of the sky like manna, but sometimes it’s just there, in plain sight. It is the cave, the ark, the dry ground, or the empty manger just the right size for Mary’s son.

Don went on to tell a story, which I will do my best to paraphrase:

There was once a fellow whose house was being carried away by a flood. He stood on his roof and prayed to the Lord to rescue him. Along came another man in a rowboat, but the man on the roof said, “No, I prayed, and God is going to rescue me.” Along came a helicopter, but the man said, “No thanks, the Lord is going to rescue me.” When the man died in the flood, he asked the Lord in heaven why he didn’t answer his prayer. “I did,” the Lord said, “I sent you a boat and a helicopter.”

Jesus came to rescue a drowning people, and you might say they missed the rowboat. He was too small, too unassuming, too unmysterious. There was nothing O Night Divine about a Jewish mother giving birth to a boy—was there?

But if there was – if the Christ of Heaven made himself nothing and took the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men – I have to wonder what else he might do through small means of grace? Could he use our homes? Our conversations? Our meals at the table, our gathered congregations on Sunday, our quick and helpless prayers in the middle of the night?

Sometimes, the grace of God is as unsearchable and inscrutable as a host of heavenly angels. Sometimes, grace is as small as a turnip, a fig, a kidney bean, an olive.

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“He has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate.”

~ Luke 1:52

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