The Christmas story has been told so often: Mary giving birth in the dark of night and cold of winter; the newborn baby, vulnerable, fragile; the birth in the stable, because no one would give the mother any better room.
It is a study in contrasts, isn’t it? There is darkness in the night, and yet the radiance of God’s love is in the child. The winter is cold, but the baby brings the fire of God’s love to earth. The baby is so small and helpless; and yet he is the Word, who in the beginning was God and was with God. The humble animals surround the child, but the angels of God sing his birth. The child is poor and lowly in origin, and yet all the power of God is his. The stable is lowly, but it is the king of kings who is born into it.
The answer lies in us, I think. We ourselves are a study in contrasts. We are dark and cold. The darkness in our lives, the coldness in our hearts, makes us a winter to ourselves. And yet there is a longing in each one of us that will not be still. We hunger for light and warmth, in others, in ourselves, in God. We yearn for love, but we also resist it. We yearn, and then we wrap ourselves in coldness again, so that we will not be seduced by the lure of the love we yearn for. We fear that for us the reality is only winter and night, and yet somehow in the deep heart’s core we feel the love of God that calls us.
So think of it this way. Whose cold heart is proof against a helpless child? Who could feel threatened by a newborn in a stable? Who could not fail to feel at least a little the love that is born in Bethlehem?
And that is why—in the dark of the night that we are, and in the winter of our hearts—the baby is born. The light shines in our darkness. We can let it in.
