God came | A Christmastide reflection

Our nativity set was a gift from my grandparents, given piece by piece over the first few years of our marriage. I was proud to bursting that first Christmas when I lifted out of their styrofoam packaging the carved Joseph with his staff, a lowly shepherd carrying a lamb, and a kneeling Mary, her whole body curved in lovingly around baby Jesus who lay cradled in her arms. Even though we have had the whole cast of characters for many years now (many of whom have been glued back together at some point), it is still a precious tradition to pull them out of their smooth brown boxes and arrange them just so to grace our home for the season.

On the day I lugged out the nativity box, my heart was still heavy from the previous day’s grief of celebrating my grandma’s birthday without her for the first time since her passing this fall. There is something about the loss of the gentle covering of unconditional love, delight, and fervent prayer that a grandparent gives a grandchild—even a grown adult one with kids of her own—that leaves you feeling small and vulnerable, a little more exposed to the elements in a hurting world.

Jane, as soon as she noticed me carrying the tattered box into the dining room, appointed herself my assistant. She is the only other person in the house who can match my level of sentimentality about such things, and her radiant excitement as I sliced through the tape holding the storage box closed helped me be of good courage as we began this tender task.

We found the box holding Mary, Joseph, and the shepherd, and slid out the styrofoam casing. We opened the cover, and Jane gasped with her palms to her cheeks as I lifted out Mary and baby Jesus for her to see. She reached toward the carving, and I placed it in her little cupped hands.

“Do you know who the mommy is?” I asked.

“Mary,” she said, not looking up from the figurine.

“And who is she holding?” I prodded.

She gave a brief pause, then looked up at me. “God.”

It would have been easy to grin and dismiss her reply a little one’s go-to “Sunday School answer” if she hadn’t said it so reverently, in a barely audible whisper, holding the Mother and Child to her chest.

I suppose that’s the whole glorious truth that we’re trying to grasp in these glowing, fraught, precious days, the point of all this, isn’t it? The soft, warm, needy flesh, the round cheeks and dark hair that Mary held in her arms on that holy night centuries ago…

He is God.

The details of this miraculous birth are beautiful and are evidences of God’s faithfulness and salvation through ancient prophesies fulfilled. The life he lived, the words he spoke, the death he died, and his victorious resurrection are glorious and have the power to make things long dead burst into life.

But the wonder of what we are celebrating in these 12 days of Christmastide is not primarily how Jesus came (though it matters greatly!) or what he would do to accomplish the redemption of all things (though we will with a 50-day Eastertide feast!), but simply that God came.

Into our sorrow, he came.

Into our sadness, he came.

Into our best of intentions and unmet expectations, he came.

Into our love, so joyfully and achingly deep, but unable to heal all harms, powerless to right all the wrongs of this world, he came.

Fully divine, fully human. Fully with us.

In the unraveling of grace-filled time, we get to glory in this truth afresh, not as people who are commemorating an important event that happened 2,000 years ago, but as those who are being shaped by a present reality.

Emmanuel came. He will come again. He is coming. He is God with us, even now.

And I think that’s plenty of glory to fill our imaginations with for the next 12 days at least.

A glorious Christmastide to you, my friends!