I don’t think that much about baby Jesus, certainly not outside of Christmas. I like babies just fine, but it isn’t the image of the virgin birth or a baby born in a manger that brought me back to Christianity. I came back to church during Lent; the heartbreak and healing of Good Friday and Easter brought me home all over again. Don’t get me wrong, Christmas is great, but that's not the image I turn to in moments of trouble.
Most of the time when people talk of Baby Jesus, I think of the immortal Ricky Bobby, of Talladega Nights, praying over a dinner of KFC and Pizza Hut to “Baby Jesus, lying in your crib, can’t even talk yet, watching your Baby Einstein DVDs, thank you for my smoking hot wife”. Baby JEEEsus is a punchline. I love Christmas songs and I love babies, but the God in my prayers is an adult God.
Recently, I saw Baby Jesus in a different light. Perhaps the familiar story had lost it wonder--as often happens to an adult come home to the faith of her fathers. Perhaps, as a mother of two little girls, I saw it a new perspective. For some reason, the incarnation of God as a helpless human baby took on a new meaning suddenly.
No one understands the helplessness of a baby more than a new mother. I remember holding my babies so tenderly, so carefully, so tightly, while occasional thoughts of danger and destruction flashed through my mind. “What if I dropped her? What if I fell down holding her? What if the car crashed? What if she slipped under the water in the bathtub?” Those moments only lasted a split second; I chocked them up to new mother’s anxiety and appreciated how they made me more vigilant. So, what does it mean that God willingly takes on that type of helplessness? What does it mean that God allows himself to be cared for by a regular, low-class Jewish woman with a carpenter husband and a baby that isn’t his? God sure must trust people a whole lot.
As children grow, it’s not just the physical world that terrifies mothers. I hope and pray that I’m making the right decisions raising my girls. I want them to respect me, to obey me when their safety is on the line, to feel secure in their own persons, to feel loved and accepted, to test their abilities, to persevere through hardship. I want to help them learn discipline and compassion. I want them to know the love of a mother, so they can love others. I want to love them into being the people they were born to be. Some regular, low-class Jewish woman with a carpenter husband prayed for the same things for her son. Some mother loved him into being who he became.
Suddenly, it hit me. The incarnation isn’t just God deigning to become human in order to teach us and to love us. Yes, Jesus did teach us and he did love us. But before he could do that, he was taught and he was loved--by us. God loved the world so much that he gave his only son (John 3:16). And someone loved that only son so much that he grew up to become all he should have been--God in flesh. God trusted humans so much that he let us shape him, just a little bit, let us teach him how to walk, to talk, to read. He trusted humans enough to let them love him into being one. I know lots of people and I’m not sure I trust any of them that much. People are pretty rotten, selfish, lazy, and annoying. Who in his right mind would lay his life in the likes of those? Once, again I am wrong. That little baby trusted his parents to raise him into a man; I need to trust my fellow man to life up to his potential, too. God loved us into being, and then he gave us the supreme gift of allowing us to love God into being, too.
That my friends is why, this year, I, too, will pray to “Little Baby Jesus”.
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