Christmas Day A (Luke 2:1-14)

​St. Luke’s account of the nativity is remarkably understated. It is spare in detail, sober in tone, almost matter-of-fact. Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem for the census, the inns are full, and they find shelter wherever they can. Given Emperor Augustus’s decree, crowds are flooding into the town for registration. The world is moving under imperial command.

Popular imagination often fills in the gaps. We picture Joseph and Mary knocking on door after door, turned away again and again, rejected at every threshold. Yet Luke never tells us that. What we know is simpler and, perhaps, more unsettling: like everyone else, they are swept up in the movement of empire, obeying orders, doing what they must, making do with what they can find. And perhaps this is precisely the point: the stable is where Caesar’s command does not reach. On the margins of imperial decree, beyond the reach of Rome’s authority, God enters the world.

Luke’s nativity also follows a familiar pattern: the birth of a savior marked by signs and wonders. Stories like this are found in every culture. Harry Potter survives the killing curse as an infant. The future king of Korea emerges from an egg. The infant Siddhartha Gautama takes seven steps at birth, lotus flowers springing up beneath his feet, and declares his spiritual destiny. Human beings have always told stories like this to say: “Pay attention—this birth matters.”

But on this Christmas Eve, the gospel will not allow us to be mesmerized only by wonders and signs. The shepherds are indeed guided by an angelic message to the child, the Messiah, the anointed one. Yet Luke goes further. He dares to call this child “Lord.” This is not just a religious honorific. “Lord” is the word used in our Christian translations for the divine name in the Hebrew Bible—the sacred tetragrammaton, YHWH, the name that is not even spoken aloud. Luke is telling us that in this infant, the God of Israel is present.

The shepherds are led to an infant lying in a manger, and they are meant to see God there. This is the scandal at the heart of Christian faith: God revealed in the most vulnerable form of human existence. It is a radical humanism that overturns our usual picture of divinity. An infant has no fixed identity yet, no achievements, no résumé. When we look at an infant, we see nothing but exposed human need—the need for shelter, for protection, for food, for tenderness, for constant care.

Mary treasures all this and ponders it in her heart. That is her courage and her faith: to see the divine from the manger to the cross, to hold both together in one heart—the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and the man stripped and nailed to the wood. She does not yet know where the story will lead, but she keeps watching for God in this vulnerable life.
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Others will also watch to see how Jesus “turns out.” But his ending will not look like the end of a hero’s tale. He will not die on a throne but on a cross. He will die like a criminal, executed as one. The vulnerable infant becomes the condemned man. Here Christian ethics are stretched to their breaking point: can we see God in the executed criminal? Can we see God in the one the world has judged, discarded, and cast out? If we cannot see God there, then we have not yet understood what we celebrate at Christmas.

The incarnation confronts us from the very beginning, because it asks us to see God in the most fragile form of human life. The resurrection is God’s unbreakable “yes” to that same humanity—God’s faithfulness to the very flesh in which God chose to dwell, even in those whom society calls worthless or despicable. If God is found in an infant laid in a feeding trough, and in a man hung on a cross, then God can be found in every human life.

And here is the challenge, and the call, for us. Those who cannot see God in the vulnerable will find it hard to believe in the hope of the resurrection. Our Christian vocation is to see God in every human being, to look for the trace of goodness even where it seems hidden or lost. And when goodness seems absent, we do not give up; we help to cultivate it. We create spaces—gardens of grace—where each person can grow into the image of God they already bear, and where their flourishing helps others to flourish as well.

This is the daily work of resurrection: to tend, to nurture, to protect, to call forth the divine life in every living being. At Christmas, we see that work beginning in a manger. In Jesus, God teaches us how to see: how to see the divine in the human, the holy in the vulnerable, the glory of God in the face of a child.