The Savior’s Lowly Birth

It’s easy to have sentimental thoughts about the Christmas story, but Jesus’ birth involved hardship. Today, Sinclair Ferguson conveys the message of the best Christmas hymns: all of Christ’s suffering was for our salvation.

On Things Unseen this week, we’ve been thinking a little about the challenge at Christmastime, the challenge to keep Jesus Himself at the heart of things. And I know that kind of talk can sometimes devolve into a sense of duty, responsibility, and perhaps even a burden. It’s always struck me as a paradox that’s difficult to get our heads around that the very season when the church celebrates the One whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light is actually a season in which many Christians feel an excessive sense of burden. Now, no doubt, one of the reasons for that is the false expectations we are encouraged to have.

Here’s one example, although I hope I’m not going to spoil your Christmas Eve service by mentioning it. These services often begin with the words of Luke 2:15, usually in the King James Version: “Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.” I have to confess, I’ve given up trying to get to Bethlehem on Christmas Eve because you can’t get there.

I think I know what people are trying to say when they use this verse, but I wonder if the great hymn writer, Horatius Bonar, had the same experience. He wrote a little hymn about looking for Christ, in which he says, “We went to Bethlehem,” but Christ wasn’t there. That is to say, I can’t generate this new affection I need by making an imaginary geographical journey to where Jesus was born.

So, maybe we need to think in a different way about our struggles to feel like Christmas. After all, there were certain elements in the first Christmas that didn’t feel very Christmassy: a long journey away from home for a young woman expecting a child, almost certainly still in her teens. No Holiday Inn, no Hampton Inn, never mind the Ritz for Joseph and Mary, instead going round Bethlehem looking for somewhere to rest, a place for Mary to wait for the imminent birth of her son. It crosses my mind just as I think of that: Was Jesus’ birth possibly, humanly speaking, premature because of their journey and their struggles to find a place? Not premature from God’s point of view—I mean simply how difficult it must have been for Mary. And in addition, young Mary’s mother almost certainly wasn’t there to help. And then, I don’t know how many times we need to sing, “The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes, but little Lord Jesus, no crying He makes” to realize that couldn’t possibly be wholly true. And then, later on, there were the warnings about Herod and the exodus in reverse that Mary and Joseph had as they hastily bundled up their little son one night and made their way down to Egypt. There’s not much that feels Christmassy about that, is there?

And yet, it’s understanding their hardship that creates the expulsive power of a new affection because the gospel tells us this was all for us. And this is what the best Christmas hymns are all about, how Christ’s suffering and impoverishment was all for us:

Thou who wast rich beyond all splendour,
All for love’s sake becamest poor.

Or perhaps you know, the hymn by the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet, Richard Crashaw:

Gloomy night embraced the place
Where the noble Infant lay: The Babe looked up and showed His face;
In spite of darkness, it was day!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
Great little One! Whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to Heav’n, stoops Heav’n to earth.

Or perhaps you know the lovely Gaelic carol:

Child in the manger,
infant of Mary; outcast and stranger,
Lord of all;
Child who inherits
all our transgressions,
all our demerits
on Him fall.

Or:

He came down to earth from heaven
who is God and Lord of all,
and His shelter was a stable,
and His cradle was a stall:
with the poor, and mean, and lowly,
lived on earth our Savior holy.

Or perhaps you know that other seventeenth-century carol by Thomas Pestel:

Behold the great Creator makes
Himself a house of clay,
a robe of human flesh He takes
which he will wear for aye.

I wonder if these words about the amazing humiliation, the suffering of the Son of God, our Lord Jesus, don’t they create a new affection in your heart for Him? I hope so, and may it be so.