Our time of preparation has come to fruition! As we celebrate the birth of Our Lord, I invite you to pause for a moment and reflect in your heart. During this season of Advent what has challenged you? What has comforted you? As you think about this, allow me to ask this question: Where was Christ’s temple on the night of his birth? It was a stable. You don’t have to be a gleaming palace for Jesus. He told you for all time that he preferred your dirty stable of a soul to a worldly throne by the circumstances of his birth. Just like with you, Jesus did not chose a stable because it was perfect, beautiful, and holy. Yet it became all of those things to the greatest degree possible because he was there.
But there’s more to this, because we know very well that Jesus didn’t come into the world to give us only good words and profound examples of moral living. He came specifically to provide a rescue for every human heart, to rescue us from sin and spiritual death by paying the penalty we couldn’t afford to pay ourselves. In Jesus’s own words, he came into the world as God incarnate to offer himself as a ransom so that we can be save. And because of Jesus’s payment and resurrection, our souls can feel their worth. Christmas is not just the birth of someone whose example helped humanity. It’s the birth of the One who saves humanity from itself. In a paradox of time, Easter’s hope gives rise to Christmas’s joy.