The facts of Christmas, rhymed in carols, recited by children in church plays, illustrated on cards, have become so familiar that it is easy to miss the message behind the facts. After reading the birth stories once more, I ask myself, If Jesus came to reveal God to us, then what do I learn about God from that first Christmas? Before Jesus, almost no pagan author had used "humble" as a compliment. Yet the events of Christmas point inescapably to what seems like an oxymoron: a humble God. The God who came to earth came neither in a raging whirlwind nor in a devouring fire. Unimaginably, the Maker of all things shrank down, down, down, so small as to become an ovum, a single fertilized egg barely visible to the naked eye, an egg that would divide and re-divide until a fetus took shape, enlarging cell by cell inside a nervous teenager. "Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb," marveled the poet John Donne. He "made himself nothing ... he humbled himself," said the apostle Paul more prosaically. I remember sitting one Christmas season in a beautiful auditorium listening to Handel's Messiah, with a full chorus singing about the day when "the glory of the Lord shall be revealed." The Messiah who showed up, however, wore a different kind of glory, the glory of humility. "`God is great,' the cry of the Moslems, is a truth which needed no supernatural being to teach men," writes Father Neville Figgis. "That God is little, that is the truth which Jesus taught man." I caught glimpses ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFX7Y1dLnm0&hl=en
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