Wednesday in Advent 1

Away in a manger, no crib for a bed,
The little Lord Jesus laid down His sweet head.
The stars in the sky looked down where He lay,
The little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay.

John 1:3, Psalm 19:1

“Away in a manger” lays a newborn boy. Far from home and without proper lodging, His mother finds herself enduring labor in the least comfortable of places and giving her son a feeding trough as His first bed.

The child, lays his head where animals have fed. A head the hymn describes as “sweet”, but couldn’t that be said of every child? What makes this boy differnt? If you are among those who have or have had children, it is quite certain that this word left your lips almost nightly in description of your own new baby. As you beheld them sleeping, who did they look like? You, your spouse, one of their grandparents? No doubt this unique child bore a resemblance to His mother, but who was His father? Certainly it was not the man who attended to His mother that night during her labor. Who is the child in the manger, and from where does He come?

Such humility was He born into, that although he was born to the fiancé of a carpenter, he had no crib and slept instead upon borrowed hay, but lest we be mistaken, this is not a lesson on poverty or a plea for charity, as has often been said. The primary lesson here is not compassion or humility, at least not on the part of any human, but we see here the humility and compassion of God given human flesh that night.

The child there laid was the “little Lord”, named Jesus, born a truly human male, but that boy was God, born not in the natural way, but born as the power of God overshadowed a virgin by the Holy Spirit and the divine Son of God was given human flesh to be the savior of humanity. This is not the kind of thing inspired by an imaginative author or the stuff of hallmark cards or a movie of the week. This is the incarnation of God Himself upon the earth. The hymn says that the stars in the sky looked down where he lay. The Psalm says that the heavens declare the glory of God and the skies proclaim the work of his hands, and on that night a new star declared the glorious action of God in sending His Son, without whom nothing on earth was made, and angels filled the sky proclaiming the merciful work of God—that the creator of heaven, sky, stars, angels and all things had come to reside in a Bethlehem stable as a newborn baby.

This “Little Lord” was born to a humble beginning, but a humility unable be compared to the agony of His end as He bore the sin of the world at the cross. The wood of the manger at his birth would be exchanged for the wood of another tree upon which creator of the man and beast, stable and star, would pay the penalty for His creature’s rebellion, and the mother who knelt above the manger in joy would kneel in sorrow beneath His cross.

For this, we prepare to celebrate His birth with repentant joy, for in Him we are made children of God by water and the spirit, and promised new life as His brothers in resurrection, when He returns to raise and judge the living and the dead and give eternal life to all who trust in Him.