An infant lying in a
manger: we’re so used to seeing that image on Christmas cards, in our beautiful
crèche, in the nativity sets many of you may have set up in your homes, that it
no longer catches us off guard. Try to
imagine that we’d never seen it before.
If you saw a baby, in a manger, in a feeding trough for animals, given
no prior associations, what would we think?
Would we think it was cute? Not
for long, not once we’d seen the rough finish and remaining straw scratch the
baby. Would we think it was a fitting
throne for a king? Would we think it was
a bed for a savior? A glorious
tabernacle for our God?
No, it’s
a manger. It’s a small trough for
feeding animals. Putting a baby in it
might be awkwardly charming if done by a comfortably off family for an
eye-catching family picture. Or, it might
be a sign that this babe’s parents were desperate, at their wits ends. If you met the parents, you might hear the
strange accent of someone who wasn’t from round here. You might delve deeper and encounter them as
transients, people with no home, who only had access to housing because someone
had deigned to give them the shelter equivalent of scraps from the table. These were nobodies, the people society
preferred not to have to look at, but for whom they’d grudgingly give up a
manger if a baby needed it. Babies,
after all, are meant to be cute.
But to
reduce this image to cuteness is to domesticate it, to try to tame our God. The strangeness of this image – a baby in a
feeding trough – is a dare from God to ask the question, why? The strangeness should jolt us. There, in a feeding trough, is the one the
angels had proclaimed Savior, Lord, Messiah.
A strange sort of Lord, to lie in a feeding trough, surrounded by his transient
mother, her husband, and peasant agricultural workers! What is God trying to say to us, by coming in
this way?
Maybe
there’s a question there. Are you
hungry? Do you feel needy? Do you have wants, hopes, desires yearning to
be fulfilled? Are you lonely,
downhearted, or grieving? Do you long
for the peace the world cannot give? Are
you hungry? The strangeness of this
image might just shock us into saying, “Yes.
Yes, I’ve received great gifts, I’m so very blessed, but yes: I have a
hunger in my heart.”
We’re
hungry. And God puts Himself in a
feeding trough. The Creator of heaven
and earth, that measured the stars in a span, that counts every hair on our
head, put Himself in a feeding trough that the hungry might be filled. John will be explicit and have Jesus say in
so many words “I am bread for the world!”
Luke paints the same truth in a more provocative hew: he has Mary sing
that the hungry will be filled, and puts Jesus in a feeding trough. God offers Himself for us, and that’s not
just a message for Good Friday, that’s the Good News of Christmas. The incarnation isn’t cute, it’s a profound,
radical, self-emptying act of abundant love on God’s part reaching out; “Proclaim
to the ends of the earth!” cries Isaiah.
God took on tiny baby hands and tiny baby feet, and let them be pricked
by hay to say: your hunger will be filled, in me; your longing hearts will find
rest.
The song
we sing near the start of nearly every Sunday Mass “Glory to God in the highest
and peace to people of good will” is based on the song the angels sang to the
shepherds in the fields. Christ’s birth
brings peace. That deep lasting shalom peace-with-justice for which we
hunger. We’ve joined with the angels in
singing that song. We’ve joined with the
shepherds who went in haste to find Mary, Joseph and the babe in the manger.
And now,
we’re about to take the step that those shepherds couldn’t. Our God will come, on this altar, will come
and be broken for us, that a scattered, broken people might stream to Him,
might take and eat, might be made whole.
Everyone the shepherds told about this was amazed. We read that the shepherds kept on glorifying
and praising God. Those are the last
spoken words you’ll hear at this Mass: “Go in peace, glorifying God by your
life.” Tonight, we are all amazed
shepherds. May we never lose our
amazement at the extravagant love God has shown for us in Christ, at what God
is doing for us, God who offered Himself out of great love for our salvation,
God who feeds. Don’t just have a happy
Christmas; have an amazed Christmas; and then you’ll amaze the world, like an
angel, like a shepherd.
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