Christmas is the most famous birthday in the world.
No competition.
No other birth in human history comes close.
This is the birthday that stops the world. The birthday that lights up whole streets, that chokes airports, that causes dawn queues at the fish market.
The birthday that children look forward to more than that of their own parents!
Its a grand & glorious celebration of Jesus' birth.
The first Christmas though was clouded by a strange mix of glory and shame. In Luke 1 Gabriel appears to Mary and tells her that her son will be the long awaited king in the line of David who will rule the kingdom that will never end. That sounds glorious, right? But Mary asks how this could take place - she is a virgin! Pregnancy for Mary would bring shame on herself, on Joseph, on her family. It would be misunderstood. It would cause scandal and gossip.
As you read the birth accounts in the gospel it is easy to see this shame at work. Joseph's first thoughts are of divorce. The family town of Bethlehem does not welcome them. The birth takes place in a stable which was more 'mean and lowly' than we imagine.
Why does God do things this way? Why not have Jesus born in a palace? Why not have angelic choirs sing to all of Jerusalem? Why Mary? Why allow the birth to take place in a stable?
The manger seems a shameful place for God to be born but is where God's glory will be made known. The glory of God's entry into the world was misunderstood and maligned, and caused joy then only for the strange cast that God revealed his purposes to.
Luther puts it this way:
Nobody notices or understands what God performs in the stable….Thus God indicates that he pays no attention at all to what the world is or has or can do, and on the other hand the world proves that it knows nothing at all of, and pays no attention to what God is or has or does. Behold, this is the first symbol wherewith Christ puts to shame the world and indicates that all of its doing, knowledge, and being are contemptible to us, that the greatest wisdom is in reality foolishness, that its best performance is wrongdoing, and that the greatest good is evil” (LW 52:9-10)
Why does God choose to come into the world in a way that He knows will be seen as shameful? Maybe because the one born in a manger will die on a cross. Christ takes on our shame at the manger, just as he does at the cross. The manger is the beginning of a journey that will end at the cross. And the cross is a shameful place for God to die but will be where God's glory will be made known.
So God gives us this mix of shame and glory, as He chooses to come into our world in his own strange but magnificent way.
