My heart is heavy as we approach Christmas. My dear friend was pregnant (due on Dec. 20) and found out Dec. 12 that her baby girl had died in utero. After delivering her, she held the lifeless baby in her arms all day before finally leaving the hospital. As friends gathered around her this week, it was such a somber time in an otherwise joyous holiday season. Our mourning seemed so out of place with the colored lights and Christmas carols playing on the radio. How do you reconcile death at Christmastime?
While the two ideas seem light years apart, they are actually inextricably linked. Jesus came to Earth precisely because of death – the death Adam and Eve brought on themselves and all of us that fateful day in the Garden of Eden. Jesus came to pay the debt that God required. Not His debt, but ours. We live with Heaven on our mind thanks to His selfless arrival on Christmas day (and ultimately, His selfless submission on Good Friday.)
Another dear friend, Hudson Davis, who writes beautifully about his deep faith in Jesus recently wrote this about this fact better than I can:
Before the Manger—The Garden
The little baby boy cooing so mildly in the manger
made of weakness and nakedness and poverty a crown.
The Son of Man, the Son of God, smiling so sweetly in the manger
affirmed that had not forgotten His promises.
But before the manger—the Garden.
Our need arose in the Garden of Eden and was soothed in the Manger.
Our weakness and our helpless condition begged His mercy
and He did not despise our need.
It was our cry He uttered at birth, and our pain He came to bear.
It was we who were naked and poor—so the Son of God joined us in our misery.
Beyond the romantic sentimentality of ribbons and bows,
beyond those things we want and will not get,
we know and believe that God has come to be—with us.
That makes all the difference on Christmas Day.
But before the manger—the Garden.
For in the Garden the human drama took a turned for the worse.
In the Garden it became all too obvious that the works of our hands yield death.
In the Garden our nakedness was exposed and our wickedness made known.
In the Garden our sins cried out to a loving God
and in His love He sent the Son to be one of us.
In the manger, in the form of frail humanity
the Son of God answered our plea—"Here I am!"
It is no more complex than that,
but we dare not leave this deep truth beneath the tree,
to be opened on Christmas day.
For with all that we must do it might just get lost
among the boxes
and wrappings
and toys.
Gen. 3, Is. 43:2, Luke 1-4, Matt. 1-3
Copyright(C)2007 Hudson Russell Davis
www.streamsinthewilderness.com/writings
St. Lucy
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