Christmas is a celebration that an incalculable gulf was crossed: God revealing Himself to us. God has done that ever since the beginning of the world, of course. He reveals His nature and power to us through the world He has made: in thunderstorms and daffodils and mountain peaks. He also speaks, like He did to Moses from the burning bush or to the Prophets or Apostles who penned Scripture. He has even personally appeared a few times, like when He wrestled with Jacob or appears to Abraham (see Gen 18; 32:22-32). Our God is a God who wants to be known, who speaks, who reveals. But as great as all of these modes of revelation are, they pale in comparison with what we are celebrating today. On Christmas day, God is not merely speaking with us, He is not taking on the appearance or likeness of a human form. He becomes a human being…becomes one of us. He is Immanuel: God with us.

Yet, it can be easy for us to grow familiar to the message. To slide by it and have our affections and imagination wrapped up in other things. Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformer, 500 years ago noticed that people would often be indifferent to the wonder of Christmas:

We receive this news, Luther says, as a sip of beer (which, for Luther, was a fairly common thing)—like cows with their big, dumb eyes trampling beautiful flowers in the field. We don’t want God with us—we would rather have riches!

Why is it so underwhelming to us? In part, because we don’t understand the whole of what it means; we have not thought enough about it. So, let’s do that now.

John’s gospel opens with the announcement of the surprising news of the Incarnation: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth…No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known,” (John 1:14, 18). The Son of God, the second member of the Trinity, has come down into the little town of Bethlehem, passed through the birth canal, taken a human nature. Why? John tells us: to make visible the invisible God: no one has ever seen God…and he has made him known.

Repeatedly throughout John’s gospel, Jesus makes it clear that when He speaks, He is only speaking what the Father tells Him to speak (John 12:49). Whenever He acts, He is only doing what the Father does (John 5:19). When asked by a disciple to show him the Father, Jesus replies: “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9)

Jesus is here to show us—in a way that a thunderstorm or even the thunderings from atop Mount Sinai couldn’t—what God is like. He is, in the words of Hebrews, “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature,” (Heb 1:3).

How He Came

The Incarnation is a mystery. Behind the child’s eyes of the baby lying in a manger there is divinity, omnipotence who “upholds the universe by the word of his power,” (Heb 1:3).

Humbly He lay, Creator come as creature.

The Son of God’s arrival on Christmas morning as a newborn baby was to demonstrate that He was really, and truly a human being. As the Chalcedonian creed states, Jesus is: ”truly God and truly man…of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood; like us in all respects, apart from sin.” Jesus was a real human being. We needed a human representative to obey God’s Law on our behalf. Adam failed. We needed a new Adam who didn’t. So, the Son of God comes down and becomes our second Adam.

True Son of God, yet bearing human feature. He entered earth to reverse Adam’s fall.

Which means he had to become a man. He became a helpless infant. A stumbling toddler who had to be taught His ABC’s. A kid helping his mom with the dishes. A teenager laughing with friends. A young man learning a trade. He experienced the whole of the human experience, yet without sin. And this humanity has more purposes than just the work of salvation. Luther encourages you:

I would not have you contemplate the deity of Christ, the majesty of Christ, but rather his humanity. Look upon the Baby Jesus. Divinity may terrify man. Inexpressible majesty will crush him. That is why Christ took on our humanity, except for sin, that he should not terrify us but rather that with love and favor he should console and confirm.

…See how God invites you in many ways. He places before you a Baby with whom you may take refuge. You cannot fear him, for nothing is more appealing than a baby.

The arrival of the Son of God into the world was not a display of shock-and-awe majesty or power or pomp or worldly glory. He came as a baby. And does that not in of itself communicate to you something of the nature of our God? Nothing is more appealing than a baby. Hardened criminals will melt before a dewey eyed, chubby-cheeked baby. You can stare into the eyes of a baby and they will look right back at you with no awkward tension or discomfort. They will gaze and gaze and you will smile at such unembarrassed, singular attention. What would it have been like for Joseph and Mary to stare into the eyes of the Son of God like that? That kind of arrival shows you what God is like: He is approachable, tender, unembarrassed to look at you with the eyes of singular affection and attention.

Are you frightened? Then come to him…Who is there whom this sight would not comfort? Now is overcome the power of sin, death, hell, conscience, and guilt, if you come to this gurgling baby and believe that he has come, not to judge you, but to save. - Martin Luther, a Christmas sermon

Where He Came

The arrival of the Son of God as an infant itself doesn’t display the fullness of God’s compassion and humility. Jesus could have become human, but been born into a family of wealth or power or status or in the swell of perfect circumstances. But He wasn’t. Everything about Jesus’ birth seems to indicate that Jesus was, quite literally, born in the lowest place. Mary’s virgin conception had caused quite a controversy (unwed, teenage pregnancy is always a scandal) and nearly led to her betrothed husband to leave her. A nation wide census was being taken, requiring Mary and that brand new husband (Joseph) to travel right when Mary was due. And when Mary goes into labor, there is no room in the inn, so they are forced to reside in an animal stall.

It was winter time, so it would have been chilly, poorly lit, strewn about with animal droppings and livestock bumbling around. Our nativity sets trick us into a sanitary, quaint location—a rustic barn with the attractive accouterments of Hobby Lobby where a glowing Jesus lies on fluffy straw. If you have been in a barn before, you know that it isn’t cute. It certainly isn’t somewhere you want to give birth. The young Mary is forced to give birth after a day of travel with a man whom she has never even been intimate with and now must rely on him alone to deliver the child. Her mother, sisters, aunts, grandmother—not a single woman or familiar face or even a person who has any experience in childbirth are present.

We know that Mary and Joseph were not wealthy (because of the offering provided in Luke 2:24), nor well connected—if they were, would Jesus have been born in a manger? With enough money and the right names being dropped, surely Joseph could have secured a room.

So, why, in God’s providence, were things so difficult for Jesus’ family?

The setting of the birth of the Son of God into this world is beset by the pinch of poverty, extraordinary unforeseen circumstances, the stress and physicality of living in a world of sweat and anxiety. And there, in the midst of that, the Light of the World comes down and is laid in the trough where animals eat.

Humbly He lay, Creator come as creature Born on the floor of a hay-scattered stall.

Why? The church father, Jerome, said: “Jesus was born in a dungheap because that’s where he knew he’d find us.” Jesus’ birth in the worst of stations and circumstance shows us what God is like. He has not come to relate to man at his best, but men at their worst, in the lowest, bleakest, and most broken.

He knows our need, to our weakness He’s no stranger.

Why He Came

The Incarnation of the Son of God shows you what God is like: His humility, His heart, His approachability, His sympathy. But what does He do with all of those characteristics?

“She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” -Matt 1:21

We learn much about God’s heart through His willingness to become a man, to be born, to enter into the world in its broken places. But the purpose of Christmas is so that Easter can take place. The Son of God becomes a man so that He may rescue men from their sins. The Maker, the God who thunders in the sky and in the Law, who makes man and calls Him to account…is also the God who stoops, who steps down and bears our curse, our pain, our sin.

Christ who in eternity rested motherless upon the Father's bosom and in time rested fatherless upon a woman's bosom, clasping the Ancient of Days who had become the Infant of Days. What deep descent from the heights of glory to the depths of shame from the wonders of heaven to the wickedness of earth from exaltation to humiliation from the throne to the tree from dignity to debasement from worship to wrath from the halls of heaven to the nails of earth from the coronation to the curse from the glory place to the gory place! In Bethlehem, humility and glory in their extremes were joined. Born in a stable! Cradled in a cattle trough! Wrapped in swaddling clothes of poverty! No room for Him who made all rooms! No place for Him who made and knows all places! Oh, deep humiliation of the Creator -born of the creature! But in His descent was the dawn of mercy. Because we cannot ascend to Him, He descends to us. R. G. Lee (1886-1978)