What Child Is This?

Wednesday, December 18, 2013
"What Child Is This?"

The more I look at Advent and Christmas carols, the more I am convinced that Christmas has more in common with Lent then Advent in intended message -- not so much in what we do to prepare, but well, Advent (as I've written before this season) seems to be about the promise of coming salvation, even assurance that anything we could do would not matter much anyway.  The battle is already won.

Christmas carols, in secondary and tertiary verses, remind us why God had to become incarnate and eventually suffer.  Yes, that's a huge part of the message of God's Love, but, well, I can't remember feeling ashamed of myself too much at Christmas -- barring my mother's looks if I'm fighting with my sister over something stupid (it's always something stupid).

For sinners here
The silent Word is pleading.

That is why He came, to plead for us and to bleed for us.  To become like us enough that He could save us.

The King of kings salvation brings
Let loving hearts enthrone Him.

That's really the least we could do, there in the third verse.

Because what's so unfathomable about what child is lying there in a used feeding trough is not that He came to poor parents, that He was born in a stable, but that GOD ALMIGHTY IS LYING THERE DEPENDENT ON IDIOT HUMANS.  And I mean absolutely NO disrespect to the Virgin Mother or her sainted husband, simply that compared to the Omniscient Omnipotent, we are all idiot weaklings.

What child is this?  Is this child really the King of kings?  The Lord of all?  The Creator?  Did the Creator become the Redeemer?

And is He really here to save us?

Haste, haste to bring Him laud
The babe, the son of Mary.

The God who is willing to be known as such.  Haste, haste.