Christmas
Christmas
The Sign Is a Babe
Luke 2:1-20; John 1:14
On the first Christmas morning, the announcement was made: “And this will be a sign for you: you will find a babe” (Luke 2:12). The sign was a babe, a fact, an embodied fact. This is the key to the whole of Christianity; it began as an embodied fact, and it must continue as an embodied fact.
India might have said, “You will find a mystic light; that shall be the sign.” Chinese philosophy would have said, “You will find a correct code of morality.” Ancient Greece might have said, “You will find a philosophical conception.” But the gospel said, “You will find a babe.” The mystic light, the correct code, the philosophical conception, and very much more, have come together in an embodied Person. Religion is now realization.
Christ became the reconciling place where opposites met. He was the meeting place of God and humanity. Humankind, the aspiring, and God, the inspiring, meet in him. Heaven and earth came together and are forever reconciled. The material and the spiritual, after their long divorce, have in him found their reconciliation. The natural and the supernatural blend into one in his life; you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. The passive and the militant are so one in him that he is militantly passive and passively militant. The gentler qualities of womanhood and the sterner qualities of manhood so mingle that both men and women see in him their ideal and the revelation of the fatherhood and motherhood of God. The activism of the West and the meditative passivism of the East come together in him and are forever reconciled. The new individual, born from above, and the new society—the kingdom of God on earth—are both offered to us in him.
The sign is a fact. And thus it had to be: The weeping child would not be satisfied with the idea of motherhood; it wants a mother! We cannot be satisfied with the idea of salvation; we need a Savior!
O Christ, since the sign must be an embodied fact, help me this day to embody victorious living, and may this be in my total life. Amen.