The Cradle or the Cross

The story is told of a grandmother who took her granddaughter every year to her church’s Christmas Eve service. In the yard of the church was a beautiful nativity scene. The granddaughter made a startling observation, "The baby Jesus is still the same size as last year."

Christmas is celebrated in America as a holiday. It is interesting that God never once asked us to remember the birth of Christ. Christmas is a purely a human invention.  God commanded us to remember Christ’s death, which we do through the act of communion, but he never asked us to celebrate his birth.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons that Christmas affects us the way it does is the beauty of a new baby. We like cute, but we avoid profound mystery. We prefer to think of the crib rather than the cross. The world likes to think about a child born on earth rather than Christ's return to earth.

 Somehow, his helplessness appeals to us more than his might and His Deity.  Christmas is a wonderful thing. It is a good beginning. But at some point in time we have to let Jesus out of the cradle. His whole purpose of being born was to grow up; experience what is was like to be human and to die on the cross for our sin.

The story about a child being born is true and it is wonderful, but we have to go beyond being charmed by it and be changed by it.