Saturday, December 31, 2005
Seventh Christmas Day
Luke 2:5 While they were there the days were completed . . .
AND SO IT WAS CHRISTMAS
It took perhaps two years for the great machinery of the census ordered by Caesar Augustus to get started and spread its nets through the far-flung reaches of the Roman Empire. In a tiny corner of this realm a certain governor named Cyrenius did things in his own way. While in other parts of the Roman world people were enrolled wherever they happened to live at the time, just as we do it today, Cyrenius in Palestine decided to employ a system adapted to the customs of the Jews and to enroll them after grouping them in their ancestral home cities and villages.
Joseph and Mary lived at Nazareth, both of them far removed from the home of their fathers, the tiny village of David's house called Bethlehem. By the time these two joined hands and dwelt together under Joseph's humble roof, strange and wondrous things had taken place, and Mary was carrying beneath her heart the promised Redeemer of the world, the Son of God. The season of His birth was near at hand, and the event seemed certain to occur at Nazareth when suddenly the summons appeared over the sprawling signature of the governor. Mary and Joseph had to go to Bethlehem and be enrolled.
"And so it was," writes St. Luke, "that while they were there" -- the great moment came. While the world's life rattled and creaked faintly by outside, the Life of the world was born. Perhaps it was in a lean-to adjacent to a stone house, common in Bethlehem even today.
Is not this where some men keep their Jesus still? In the lean-to of their lives? In an attached, dark chamber with some sort of wall between, lest they be too greatly disturbed by Him? How sad, when it is plainly said that only they who welcome him into the inmost closet of their hearts receive the vast blessing which came into the world that Holy Night. And if our hearts are no better than the crudest mangers, what does it matter to Him? He was glad to lie in a crib of straw when He was born, and it is still home to Him where there is lowliness, if only He is bedded down in the swaddling clothes of faith and love.
