On Mary's lap is sleeping?
Whom angels greet with anthems sweet,
While shepherds watch are keeping?
This, this is Christ the King,
Whom shepherds guard and angels sing:
Haste, haste to bring Him laud,
The Babe, the Son of Mary.
“What Child is this,” What child is this whose birth we gather to celebrate this day? We learn a lot about his identity and his mission, by the company he keeps, by those who gathered for his birth: Angels, shepherds, wise men, a carpenter, and a sinless virgin: seekers, workers, the humble. There are certainly some seekers, some workers, and maybe even some angels here tonight. As my favorite Christmas card says, “the wise seek him still.”
We also learn a lot about the Christ child by where he was born: not in a royal palace, not in a hospital, not in his family home, not even in the village inn, but in stable, a cave used for housing and feeding animals in the backwater town of Bethlehem. We have a God who chooses to be born into “straw poverty”, who teaches us to seek him and to serve him in his poor ones.
But I’d like to focus not on those who witnessed his birth, nor on his place of birth, I’d like to focus on his clothes. When the angel of the Lord appeared to the shepherds, by what sign were they to know him? His swaddling clothes. “And this will be a sign for you,” the angel said, “you will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger."
There is a story about a number of priests who were on a retreat with the famous biblical scholar, Donald Senior, and they were going around the room talking about their favorite biblical passage. One priest said his favorite passage was, “Lord, to whom shall we go, you have the words of everlasting life.” Another priest said his was, “Let it be done to me according to thy word.” The priests expected the noted biblical scholar to have some complex passage from St. Paul’s letters, but he said his favorite passage was, “and they wrapped him in swaddling clothes”. They wrapped him in swaddling clothes. He says, “we have a God who was a baby in a manger, we have a God who wore a diaper, we have a God who was wrapped in swaddling clothes. That’s how accessible, that’s how loveable our God is. He’s a baby. And he wants us to pick him up, and embrace him, and kiss him, and he wants us to tell him that we love him, and need him, that he has changed our lives, and that we will spend our lives loving him.”
On Christmas Eve a few years ago, Pope Benedict wrote, “God is so great that he can become small. God is so powerful that he can make himself vulnerable and come to us as a defenseless child, so that we can love him. God is so good that he can give up his divine splendor and come down to a stable, so that we might find him, so that his goodness might touch us, give itself to us and continue to work through us.”
His swaddling clothes certainly speak of Our Lord’s humility.
Yet, the swaddling clothes have another significance.
Bethlehem wasn’t known for much, but it did have one industry, you might call it. The shepherds of Bethlehem raised lambs for the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. They were Levitical shepherds and raised the lambs that would be used in the Passover sacrifice in the Jerusalem temple. And when it was time for these lambs to be born the shepherds, would bring them into the shepherd’s cave and then they would be swaddled because the sacrifice had to be without spot or blemish.
A baby born in the same place as the sacrificial Passover Lambs, swaddled like a Passover lamb, pointed to the fact that this child was the Lamb of God born to be the sacrifice which takes away the sins of the world. Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen would often say, some men were born to live.
He was born to die for us.
Why lies He in such mean estate,
Where ox and ass are feeding?
Good Christians, fear, for sinners here
The silent Word is pleading.
Nails, spears shall pierce him through,
the cross he bore for me, for you.
Hail, hail the Word made flesh,
the Babe, the Son of Mary.
The cross he bore for me, for you. This is why he was born. Or as we recite in the Creed: "For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man." The Creed itself links these two ideas: his birth and our need for a Savior.
Had our greatest need been knowledge, God would have sent us an educator. Had our greatest need been technology, God would have sent us a scientist. So too had our greatest need been for money, God would have sent us an economist. Had our greatest need been for pleasure, God would have sent us an entertainer. But, because our greatest need was for redemption from sin, God sent us a Savior.
His very name, Jesus, means “God saves”. As the angel said to Joseph, “you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
To us is born a Savior, into the poverty of Bethlehem, to bring us the riches of heaven.
To us is born a Savior, who is wrapped in swaddling clothes, that we may know we are wrapped in God’s love.
To us is born a Savior, who brings healing to the most broken of the human family.
To us is born a Savior, who commands the storms of our life to “Be still!”
To us is born a Savior, who casts out demons from the darkest souls.
To you is born a Savior, the Passover Lamb, who allows his hands and feet to be nailed to a cross to rescue us from our sin.
To us is born a Savior, who pronounces our sins forgiven and who feeds us with his flesh and blood, that we might have eternal life.
To us is born a Savior, who sends us out to bring his scattered sheep into one flock, the Church.
To us is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, who is Christ, the Lord, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.
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