by Noel Smith
Excerpted from his editorial, December 22, 1950
Nothing that men ever imagined, nothing that men ever thought, nothing that men ever said, nothing that men ever did, nothing that men ever recorded has touched the hem of the garment of the circumstantial manner of the birth of a Savior in the city of David, who is Christ the Lord.
The restraint, the simplicity, the illuminating detail with which St. Luke records this event in the second chapter of his Gospel is the most beautiful of all the beautiful things that ever appealed to the eye, the idea the most haunting that ever entered the mind, the spirit the most fragrant and healing that ever caressed the heart. After two thousand years, in one of the most cynical and cruel ages of history, St. Luke’s story is as brilliant as the Arabian stars, as fragrant as the rose of Sharon’s plain, as haunting as the parting strains of a great music, as appealing as a smile toying with infant lips — as true as the Eternal God.
Prophetic announcement of this Event had been made in every age for 4,000 years; announced through the lips of patriarch, through the lips of lawgiver, through the stainless lips of angel, through the lips of prophet, through type and symbol. The seed of the woman would bruise the serpent’s head. The scepter would not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet until Shiloh came. A child would be born, a son would be given, the government would be upon his shoulder; and his name would be called Wonderful, Counselor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. And it would all take place in Bethlehem Ephratah, the smallest of the thousands of Judah. It would take place 434 years after Nehemiah rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem and Ezra restored the ancient worship.
The faint, appealing whines of Abel’s dying lamb announced it. The colossal failure of Nimrod — one of the mightiest men ever born, whose voice echoes across the Mesopotamian world this very day — to create a universal nation, announced it. Nebuchadnezzar, greatest monarch of the ancient world and one of the greatest ever born, announced it: “How great are his signs! and how mighty are his wonders; his kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and his dominion is from generation to generation.”
So far as the world is concerned, so far as the masses of men are concerned, including Joseph and Mary, it is all routine and commonplace. A centralized, autocratic government is making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Its bureaucratic tentacles reach out to every man and woman in the empire. All must pay tribute in one form or another. Today a census has been ordered, and compliance with the decree involves burden and expense. The poor are sewing new patches on old garments.
The tax collectors are being hated and cursed, and many a Matthew and Zaccheus among them is reflecting upon the emptiness of life. Shepherds are spending another long and weary day with their flocks. Simeon sits on the steps of the Temple awaiting the Messianic Hope. The inn is crowded with the mill-run of humanity, careless, flippant — and others, no doubt, serious and worn and sad. Joseph and Mary arrive, and they are very tired, especially she. And there is no room in the inn. And it is getting dark. In this world it does seem that might makes right and that the weak go to the wall. The rabbis are always talking about a Messianic Hope — but they have been doing it for all these years.
And all of that doesn’t take into account the clanking of the chains of 60 million slaves over the Graeco-Roman world, nor the revolting forms of vice practiced by the great and mighty, nor the infanticide, nor the degradation of women.
The Hope of the Ages appeared in such circumstances. A tired, lonely mother tears a dress into strips, which Luke refers to as swaddling clothes, wraps God incarnate in the strips, and gently lays Him upon a bed of straw. It makes foolish the wisdom of this world. It confounds the wise.
Never forget it: God is the God of commonplace circumstances, of hard, severe, monotonous circumstances. It is out of such that all of His great movements have originated. Circumstances for all, especially to us who believe, are God’s providences. Never before in our lives have they so sapped our vitalities and energies as today. We are volcanoes of inward conflicts, frustrations and repressed hostilities. Day by day we feel ourselves lashed and driven by them closer and closer to the abyss of cynicism, fatalism and abject despair. Today good men curse the day they were born.
Let us read again St. Luke’s story of the birth of Christ. Let us see the God behind it all. Let us remember His own words about His “foolishness” being “wiser than men,” and His having “chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.” There is none of us but what has some strips of cloth and a pallet of straw. In the midst of all our sufferings, let us challenge God with them and see what He can do. God knows a good deal about swaddling clothes and beds of straw.
Noel Smith was the founding editor of the Baptist Bible Tribune.