What a blessing to hear from Danny this morning as he continued our series, Honest Advent. Our goal in this series is to consider the humanity of Christmas. Today we paused and stared at three words: she gave birth. Those three words carry significant meaning. Birth is vulnerable, messy, complicated, stressful, painful, risky, and always traumatic to some extent.
If Jesus, God in human likeness, was willing to submit himself to the mess and risk and vulnerability of childbirth, let alone the dependency of a child, he’s undoubtedly willing to enter into the rest of the mess of humanity. The mess that we wade through every day: broken relationships, self-doubt, fear, anxiety, pain, sorrow.
“She gave birth” sets the tone for the rest of Jesus’ story and it is why the words in Matthew 1:23 are so important. “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel.” Matthew’s use of Immanuel links back to the prophecy of Isaiah and isn’t used for anyone else. It is only used of Jesus and means "God with us."
This says that we have a God who has experienced what we have, or are, experiencing. It means we can go through pain knowing the pain is temporary because the God who broke through and became like us, loves us. He’s been there and one day, in this lifetime or the next, he will take all the pain away.
While we wait, "she gave birth" reminds us that Jesus came as one of us, for us. As Scott Erikson writes, “A saving way came into the world just like we did - in all its goopy humanity. A birth is a rite of passage in human vulnerability…The Christ was born of blood – like we are. The Christ partook in the powerless vulnerability of coming into the world naked and weak – like we often still feel. That the Christ was born into the muck of human biology, which we seem to wade through for the rest of our lives.”
This Christmas, may "she gave birth" remind us Jesus came as one of us, for us. The invitation of the reality of the doctrine of incarnation is that anything is possible. That is the honesty of Christmas.
POWERED BY BLUBRRY
