VIII.  The Birth

In that cave Mary brought forth her first-born son; and as there appears to have been no woman’s hand there to minister to her, she herself wrapped the new-born babe in swaddling clothes; and as there was no other cradle or bed to receive it, she laid the child in the trough from which the camels were fed.  This is all we know of what took place on that memorable night from which the history of the Christian world is now dated.  The apocryphal gospels, legends that afterwards grew up, fill the chamber with supernal light so that visitors had to shade their eyes from the splendor of the child; and the painters portray the holy child and mother with halos of glory around their heads.  But this is all imagination and myth.  Jesus was born as other human beings are born, and looked just like a human child.  No one seeing him could have guessed that a unique birth had ruptured the continuity of nature and brought a divine Man into the world.  There was no glory streaming from his person, and no spectacular display of pageantry and pomp such as attended the birth of a Caesar.  The Son of Man did not come with observation, but stole into the world silently and unseen.  If we could have gazed upon the Christ-child as it lay in its manger, we would have been disappointed and thought that nothing extraordinary had happened.  But a great event rarely seems great at the time; long centuries may elapse before it looms into view and is seen in its central place as the axis of history.  Outward size and circumstance do not measure inward power and possibility.  God brought only a child into the world that night, but in that Child were sheathed omnipotent wisdom and mercy and might to save the world.

IX.  No Room in the Inn

“There was no room for them in the inn.”  And so Jesus came into a world where there was no room for him in the habitations of men.  After all this preparation through which the centuries grew into readiness for his coming, after all these types and prophecies, sacrifices and symbols, after all this weary waiting and passionate hope and all these golden dreams, when the promised One came there was no room for him and he was not wanted!  “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.”  Was there ever a greater and sadder anticlimax and a more cruel disappointment?  Let us admit that there may have been no fault in this matter, no lack of hospitality in the keeper or the guests of the inn, as the village was overcrowded, and the fact that these late arrivals were compelled to put up with a place out in the enclosure, possibly a cave, where the animals were kept, was no intended incivility or uncommon hardship.  Nevertheless, whatever may have been the reason, the fact was that there was no room for Jesus in that inn the first night he spent in this world, and this fact was sadly prophetic of his reception in the world he came to save.