When a child is born…

As we dive into the Advent season, the culture around us goes crazy for Christmas. It is still the major focus of the year for many people, yet the true reason for the season is largely left aside.

The twee Christmas cards and nativity scenes paint a romantic fairy tale picture of the birth of Jesus. For Mary and Joseph, it must have been a really challenging time, having to travel some 70 miles down to Bethlehem because Caesar Augustus wanted a head count of his empire. Yet the Lord Almighty used this decree to get them to just the right place to fulfil the ancient prophecy in Micah 5.

Travel in those days was tough and dangerous, and no fun at all if you were heavily pregnant. And there was no comfortable place to stay when they got to the small town near Jerusalem – they weren’t the only ones having to register. So, the baby was born amidst the animals, probably in the lower area of a simple rustic home.

God’s one and only son – “the Son of the Most High” (Luke 1:32), entered our world in the most humble of circumstances. Paul reflects on how the one who was “in very nature God… …made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant” (Phil 2:7).

Shepherds arrived after a divine visitation on a nearby hillside, and sometime later wise men turned up from a far-off country because they’d seen in the stars that a new king had been born. Herod, who ruled the area for the Romans, was paranoid and sought to kill this rival, leading to the little family becoming refugees in Egypt.

This is the most remarkable tale that still beggars belief – yet we are called to believe it; to trust that this is the way the very essence of God came into the world, took on flesh and blood, and made his dwelling among us (John 1:14).

In that famous prologue to his Gospel, John uses a Greek word Logos that means word, reason, discourse or knowledge (from which we get logic). This divine Word, through whom all things were made at the very beginning of creation, arrived quietly in the most unexpected way. Phillips Brooks caught it beautifully in the carol:

How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given

So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven.

“In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.” (John 1:4)

John the Baptist’s father, Zechariah, glimpsed the dawn of this new era in his prophetic words that spoke of salvation and the forgiveness of sins – “the rising sun will come to us from heaven
to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the path of peace.”  (Luke 1:78-79)

Isaiah saw it hundreds of years before – “to us a child is born, to us a son is given.” (9:6). No ordinary child but one who would be truly great and carry titles like Mighty God and Everlasting Father – and one who would reign on David’s throne, establishing justice and righteousness forever. This was to be a birth that changed history.

Fresh hope entered the broken and lost world with the birth of Jesus, God’s promised Messiah. We rightly still celebrate those incredible events around Bethlehem a whole two millennia later.

Songwriters keep returning to this eternal life-changing story:

A ray of hope flitters in the sky
A tiny star lights up way up high
All across the land dawns a brand new morn
This comes to pass when a child is born
Song by Helmut Rulofs and Fred Jay

I pray that you may grasp the full significance of Jesus’ coming into the world; the impact of which is still changing lives today.

With all good wishes for the Christmas and New Year season,