He went away from there and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. And on the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished, saying, "Where did this man get these things? What is the wisdom given to him? How are such mighty works done by his hands? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?" And they took offense at him.--Mark 6:1-3
And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.--Luke 2:6-7
I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.--John 14:18-20
"Is this not the son of Mary?" That question would have hung in the air like an accusation. Everyone knew (or thought they knew) that Jesus was illegitimate. Where did he get off, doing miracles in the name of God? How dare he--a despised orphan, a fatherless castaway--go around telling them he knew THE Father of creation. What's more--that he was His own son.
Didn't he know who his mother was? The people of Jesus' hometown didn't give Him a family name. They called Him by the world's epithets: unloved, rejected, unclaimed, insane, futureless.
That's because they hadn't been there thirty years earlier in a stable in Bethlehem where a baby was wrapped up and placed in a manger. They didn't know what the shepherds knew: that angels sang when Jesus was born because He was the only person in all of creation since Adam to NOT be born an orphan.
When I was a little girl, I was fascinated with the figure of the baby Jesus in our manger scene. I would take it and study it every Christmas. I would let my sister put in the other figures, but I had to place the baby Jesus in his rightful place, between Mary and Joseph, where the motionless shepherds and wise men could stare blankly at him from their porcelain faces. Something felt right in that ritual, physically placing the baby where he was supposed to be. Even then, I was intrigued by the mystery of the baby Jesus.
The Bible says that Jesus is the "second Adam" (1 Corinthians 15:45). But Adam was created a full-grown man; why did Jesus have to be a baby? Why couldn't He just descend to earth in a pod like Superman, or emerge an adult from a seashell like in that story about Aphrodite? I can tell you one thing, it would've made a pretty dramatic impact if He had washed up on the shore of the Sea of Galilee as a full-grown man and said to the fishermen, "Hey, follow me."
Superman and Aphrodite aren't real (sorry, comics fans), but Jesus is. And He was born in the same way all of us are. (I'll spare you the details.) What's more, He was born into a stable, surrounded by smelly animals and probably a lot of other people, who were likely talking about the suspicious and inconvenient circumstances of this birth.
We can imagine that "all of the fullness of the Diety dwells bodily" in the full-grown figure of Jesus (Colossians 2:9). But imagine all of that goodness and purity and power in a baby. Probably no more than six or seven pounds--just a baby, too little to talk, too helpless to do much more than cry and sleep.
Yes, the body of the man Jesus on the cross reveals impactfully His humility. But this is a fresh revelation for me this Christmas: the figure of the baby Jesus gives humility a sweetness and touches a chord somewhere even deeper in our hearts.
That's because if there is a baby, there is a father. Even the people of Nazareth knew that. A full-grown man can try to make it on his own. But a baby represents the existence of someone with ability and authority who will raise this helpless little being from infant to adult. A baby represents the presence of a patriarch who will make this tiny, seemingly useless human into an heir based on nothing but the testimony of blood.
Sadly, in our world, there are too many babies whose fathers are not present. But that doesn't change the fact that the fathers exist. You cannot create a baby without a father. It is impossible.
So the miracle was not as much that a virgin conceived without a father, but that there was a father, and the father was God himself.
If you think it's weird, you're not the only one. I'm sure Mary thought it was weird more than anybody.
Children are precious to God. They are so precious that He allowed His son to become one of them--helpless, weak, having done nothing yet to deserve accolade or fame--and then put on a concert of angels singing, "This is my Son; in Him I am well pleased." When Jesus was too little to defend Himself, too little to throw a punch, too little to talk, even too little to walk, His Father protected Him from Herod's wrath. His Father carefully chose earthly parents to take care of Him. According to Jewish law, His Father gave Him His own name and an inheritance. And the inheritance was His own Spirit, His own image, His own words, which brought light to an orphaned people and adopted them as children of God.
You see, the Nazarites thought that Jesus was fatherless and abandoned, a nobody; but just the opposite was true. He was the first baby born who had a heavenly Father. And He was born that way so that we could have a heavenly Father, too.
Very few of us can identify with the brutality Jesus experienced on the cross, but all of us can identify with a baby. We are all babies. It is important for us to come to the cross and realize that He became our sin. But it is also important for us to come to the stable and realize that He came as a son. He was a son first.
Jesus had to be born so that He could be the "firstborn among many brothers" (Romans 8:29): the first of a new family of people who would never be orphans again. When the devil points at us and says, "You're an orphan!", Jesus points to the angels who sang in a starry sky the night He was born and says, "No, we are fathered. We are loved."
The angel choirs are singing for you, too.
Merry Christmas!
Sing to God, sing praises to his name; lift up a song to him who rides through the deserts; his name is the Lord; exult before him! Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation. God settles the solitary in a home...--Psalm 68:4-6
