Away in a Manger Verse 2

The cattle are lowing

The baby awakes

But little Lord Jesus

No crying He makes. 

 The stars in the sky

 Look down where He lay:

The little Lord Jesus 

Asleep on the hay. 

I was thinking about this verse on the way home from a Christmas party tonight, and I realized that while I always found this verse a little strange and even off -- I apparently have very strong feelings about it.

I think this verse really clarifies the struggle that we have to really accept that God became man in two ways.  It reveals that we can't fully wrap our heads around the concept.  We reject it even as we seem to embrace it.

So the idea that Jesus didn't cry as a baby.

I remember a religion teacher in grade school telling us that, yes, Jesus was a baby, but He wasn't like other babies -- He was looking around, aware of what was going on.  At the time, I just kind of nodded along -- that sounds right.  That sounds like how God would improve on the general process of Being a Baby.

But setting aside how terrifying that concept really is, why do we need to assume that Jesus would improve on the essential human experience of Being a Baby?  Babies are impressive.  They are figuring out the world moment to moment based on a shockingly low range of visuals and a thoroughly confusing set of other sensory data.  They get the basics down really fast and their learning curve is just exponential.

Why wouldn't we want God Made Man to have that?  Or to experience that?

Someone omniscient going back to what we experience as absolute zero like that...man, right?

The second thing that makes me worry about this verse is the unspoken assumption that a Good Baby, like clearly Jesus would have been, is a Quiet Baby.  That babies that don't cry are the Good Babies.

I mean, the non-crying babies are who every parent prays they'll get, and I would never want to deny a new parent sleep and hope of sleep.  But crying doesn't mean that babies are being bad.  It doesn't mean anyone of any age is bad, actually (male or female), but that's not this post.  

A baby crying means that this little helpless creature has made the enormous mental leap to figure out that its needs will be met if it makes loud sounds.   And maybe that's the second thing that we can't really comprehend about what happened on the first Christmas day.  Omniscience becoming ignorance...and now omnipotence becoming a helpless creature entirely dependent for life and resources on two exhausted people who fundamentally cannot understand Him.

Those ideas are far too fearful, apparently.  We shy away from that reality.  The enormity, the mundanity, the sheer sacrifice and loss of what God did for us in becoming man...

It's so much more important than imagining a good and fully sentient baby toddling along trapped in a body that can't express any of His thoughts.  God so loved us He became helpless and small and started learning the world from scratch just like we all had to do in a time so bewildering and dependent that we've all blocked out the memories.

But we should never forget how very far God was willing to go for us.  The manger was nothing compared to the childhood.