Christmas Exhortation 2017: Once in a Stable

(Acts 17:27–28) that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us,  for “ ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, “ ‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ 

(1 Corinthians 8:6) yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. 

(Hebrews 2:10) For it was fitting that he [Jesus], for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering. 

Regarding Mary’s baby; the little boy wrapped in swaddling and laid in the food-trough of farm animals, the authors of the New Testament make some absolutely astonishing assertions.

Paul, preaching on Mars Hill in Athens, and quoting a Greek poet, boldly declared that it is in God that “we live and move and have our being.”

Similarly, in his letter to the Corinthian church, Paul confidently asserted that it is through Jesus that all things exist.

And then the author of Hebrews expanded this truth a little bit when wrote that it is not only by Jesus, but also for Jesus all things exist.

Wow. Think about it: The little baby boy, alternately crying and cooing in the manger; alternately nursing at Mary’s breast and filling his first century diapers, was the being in whom and for whom all things exist. Again, just wow.

Near the end of CS Lewis’ “The Last Battle”, the children and their friends walk through the door of a rather smallish looking stable and find themselves in an entirely different world.

As they try to wrap their minds around this startling phenomenon, Lucy sagely reminds her comrades of a precedent for this sort of mind-bending situation; this kind of world-upending paradox (if you will.) Lewis wrote:

Tirian looked round again and could hardly believe his eyes. There was the blue sky overhead, and grassy country spreading as far as he could see in every direction, and his new friends all round him laughing.

 “It seems, then,” said Tirian, smiling himself, “that the stable seen from within and the stable seen from without are two different places.”

 “Yes,” said the Lord Digory. “Its inside is bigger than its outside.”

“Yes,” said Queen Lucy. “In our world too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.”

Yes, indeed, Lucy. The tiny newborn bouncing on Mary and Joseph’s knees, was the one through whom, for whom and in whom all things exist. 

And this being true, the only sane thing to do is to follow the lead of the shepherds that holy night, and the example of the wise men who would follow some time later, and worship the babe through whom, for whom and in whom all things exist.

GH