For unto you is born this day a saviour, who is Christ, the Lord. Luke 2:71
The Wise Men studied the skies. In response to the sign that they saw there, they travelled from the east to worship the newly-born king, much to the distress of Herod the Great.
But the baby in the manger was not merely a king, and not merely a man with prophetic ideas, who would expose the standards of the established church as false and selfish. As the angel told the shepherds, he was to save mankind, he was the promised Messiah who would establish God's reign on earth, and he was none other than the Lord God himself.
We know that God can intervene in the affairs of the world, of individual nations, of individual people. The God who warned Noah to build the Ark, who parted the Red Sea for the children of Israel, who set fire to Elijah's offering, is the same God who raised Jairus' daughter, who cured the sick man at the Pool of Bethesda, who called Zacchaeus to serve him. And he is the same God who can and does intervene in our own lives.
The idea of the Lord of all things as Mary's baby, lying in a cradle has strained the minds of people just as much as the thought of his dying a criminal's death under Pontius Pilate. Yet this is what we must believe. This is what the Church fathers at Chalcedon in 451 meant when they insisted that Mary was the mother of God. Their aim was not to say anything about Mary, but about Jesus. For if the child Jesus had not been truly God, he would not have had the power to break the hold that sin had over man.
And if he had not been truly man, we would not have been able to share in his victory. But, as Paul wrote to the Galatians, God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those that are under the law, and to enable us to be adopted as sons. Or, in the words of St Athanasius, God became man so that man might become God, dwelling in him and sharing in the divine nature.
This is a message of infinite hope. There is no person so humble, no condition so weak as that of the infant born in the stable. Yet all may share in God's redeeming power. Emmanuel, God is with us. So at this season let us rejoice at the message of the angels, and tell the world the news of reconciliation.
HD