Advent Devotional — Thursday, December 13

December 13, 2007, 8:30 am; posted by
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Thursday, December 13, 2007
“Of the Father’s love begotten, ere the winds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega, he the source, the ending he
Of the things that are, that have been and that future years shall see.”
(Of the Father’s Love Begotten by Aurelius Clemens Prudentius; from the Evening Prayer in The Divine Hours)

This hymn illustrates Christ’s eternal nature: He is both Alpha and Omega; both the source and the capstone of all things in all times.

What does it say that such a One chose to take on flesh and to lay in a manger? This is the question that will confront you if you choose to face it in the next couple of weeks. We, who know all too well the limitations of the human experience, have to ask what it means that God would willingly take on those limitations. What does it mean that the Almighty decided to need diapers? What does it mean that the one who called together God’s people from the four corners of the earth suddenly had to walk like the rest of us, plodding over the soil?

Perhaps the message is this: before we follow Christ to the cross, we must follow Him to the manger. Before we, like Peter, assert our ability to follow Christ to death, we must first demonstrate our ability to follow Him into a seemingly lesser life, a life the world does not always understand. In fact, maybe our inability to follow Christ to the cross is directly related to our unwillingness to follow Him to the manger. Maybe we are incapable of following Christ to death if we have not first followed Him to a new kind of life.

Perhaps the call of the manger in our lives means willingly giving up income in order that those around us may have more. Perhaps it means moving out of a privileged neighborhood into another. Perhaps it means a call to sexual chastity, even celibacy, in a promiscuous world. Perhaps it means choosing to drive in less car than you could, live in less house than you could, and eat less food than you could. Perhaps this is what is involved with going to the manger: taking the things the world calls power and laying them aside, taking your birthright and giving it away.


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