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Meditations on Christmas
December 24th, 2008 by witherow
Merry Christmas, everyone!
Today’s post is going to be a little different, meaning it’s actually going to be about something, instead of me just blathering on about raisin armies or whatever it is I talk about on here.
That’s because Christmas always makes me more meditative. The thoughts I’m meditating on this Christmas are twofold: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light,” and “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
The people that walked in darkness …
In preparing for A Jerusalem Story, I did some reading about the historical setting in which Christ was born. It wasn’t the cute pastoral land so many children’s nativity plays would have us believe. Israel in the first century was a violent, unstable political landscape. When Herod the Great took power, he massacred Jews by the masses, including women, children, refugees. And he didn’t hesitate to murder anyone who was a threat to his throne, real or imagined, including several members of his own family.
But the terrors of Herod were nothing compared with what was still coming. In a few decades, the Romans would crush the Jewish Zealot revolt and Jerusalem would be devastated. The Temple would be torn down, stone by stone, and perhaps a million people would die, many brutally.
God’s people lived in the shadow of death.
But there was still Hope.
Simeon, a somewhat mysterious character in the Nativity account, waited for this Hope with his last breath. T.S. Eliot, one of my favorite poets, captures a little bit of what this might have been like in his masterful “Song for Simeon.” Here’s just a part of it (go read the rest; it’s amazing):
Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation
Grant us thy peace.
Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,
Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,
Now at this birth season of decease,
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel’s consolation
To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.
According to thy word
In these darkest of times, God did not forget His people, but came to suffer with them, for them.
“The people who walked in darkness
Have seen a great light;
Those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death,
Upon them a light has shined. …
For unto us a Child is born,
Unto us a Son is given;
And the government will be upon His shoulder.
And His name will be called
Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
And the Word became flesh …
My second thought is the whole mystery of Christmas, the great paradox of the Incarnation. How could the Immortal put on mortality? How could the Word that spoke the world into existence be given an infant’s babbling tongue? How can the life-sustaining Creator become a creature, and one that needed a mother to feed Him, rock Him to sleep and keep Him warm? How can He be both God and man—at the same time?
It’s a mind-bending paradox, one that we will never understand but can always kneel and wonder at.
Mark Lowry reflects this mystery in “Mary, Did You Know?”:
Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy will calm the storm with His hand?
Did you know
that your Baby Boy has walked where angels trod?
When you kiss your little Baby you kissed the face of God?
But I think John Rutter captures it the best in his lovely “Candlelight Carol”:
Shepherds and wise men will kneel and adore Him
Seraphim round Him their vigil will keep
Nations proclaim Him their Lord and their Saviour
But Mary will hold Him
And sing Him to sleep
Find him at Bethlehem laid in a manger
Christ our Redeemer asleep in the hay
Godhead incarnate and hope of salvation
A Child with His mother that first Christmas day
How great a mystery. How great a love, that He would come to dwell among us, knowing He would be unrecognized, dishonored, persecuted, killed. For us.
Gloria in excelsis Deo. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.
Merry Christmas.
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