Like millions of other baby-boom TV addicts, I grew up with a steady diet of sitcoms, cowboy shows, and cops and robbers—lots of cops and robbers. Detectives, from Mannix to Columbo plied their detecting trade before my impressionable eyes each week.
I could recite the Miranda warning (‘You have the right to remain silent…’) from memory long before the 23rd Psalm.
I couldn’t begin to say how many fictional arrests I have witnessed, but it’s enough that when I think of the word “arrested,” I imagine handcuffs and the slam of a cell door.
But police are not the only ones who arrest people.
If you’re paying attention, you’re likely to be arrested by God.
The simplest meaning of “arrested” is “stopped.” The police have a mandate to stop the commission of crimes, to stop actions that are dangerous or unlawful. When God arrests us, though, it’s not necessarily to prevent us from doing something wrong.
God has a long history of arresting people, including several who get arrested in the Christmas story. Mary is arrested, stopped cold from pursuing a normal life, as is Joseph whose expectations of a normal engagement and marriage were arrested, and whose subsequent intentions to dismiss Mary were also arrested.
The angels arrest shepherds who were literally minding their own business and sent them on a quest to find the promised child. A star arrested the imaginations of Magi and set them on a quest of their own.
Odds are, in this last week before Christmas, you are preoccupied with lots of needful tasks. Your mind is filled with to do lists, with worried anxiety and/or joyful anticipation of the holiday events soon to unfold at home with friends and family.
I hope, perhaps when you least expect it, that you get arrested.
I hope that something stops you, takes your breath away, makes you pause in wonder, calls you to see the ones you love with new eyes. I hope you are arrested by a fresh awareness that it is in this flesh and blood life that God comes to us.
Arrested by Emmanuel — not to be locked up but to be set free.
Prayer: I had other plans. In fact, I still do, but they’ll keep. I think I’ll just stay here a while. Amen.