A Christmas meditation {
By Michael L. Cooper-White
And the Word became flesh and lived among us … full of grace and truth (John 1:14).
A
more literal meaning of this familiar phrase from John’s Christmas Gospel would be: “God, the eter- nal Word, presses the flesh and pitches a tent in our midst.”
In the days leading up to an important election, the image of “pressing the flesh” is a familiar one as we fol- low political candidates scurrying across the land in search of votes and victory. Still, to imagine the Creator of the universe taking on human form and reaching out to touch each one of us is startling and surprising. The original New Testament Greek word for flesh is
sarx, blunt and harsh-sounding. Used by Paul as well as John, it reminds us that being flesh-and-blood humans is no easy assignment. In our sarx-ness we grow hungry and may go unfed, we become weary and may not find suffi- cient rest. As accidents, illness or the aging process brings pain and deterioration, we suffer. Finally, we sarx-creatures die and the flesh is no more, as the prophet Isaiah declared in his unflinching pro- nouncement: “All people are grass. ... The grass withers, the flower fades ….” (Isaiah 40:6-7).
God became homeless at Christmas As our radios play Perry Como crooning that old favorite “(There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays,” we are startled to recognize that God chose to leave the heavenly home that first Christmas.
The inevitable, unstoppable withering-unto-death of all human flesh is not the last word when God presses the flesh. In the Bethlehem-born Jesus, God has come to be fully among us. The Lord of the universe came to earth, a baby born to a pair of wandering pilgrims on a treacherous journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. The homeless couple’s crude birthing station (perhaps what is called a stable was really a tent) was soon sur- rounded by a band of vagabond shepherds. Then star-
Cooper-White is the president of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg (Pa.).
14 The Lutheran •
www.thelutheran.org
Once again God pitches a tent in our midst
gazing magi came calling, tent-dwelling road warriors traveling by camel or on foot.
Soon after the Christ child was born, his parents took him out on the road, tenting again on their way down to Egypt where they fled from the madman Herod’s murder- ous mayhem.
Perhaps out there on the road father Joseph had pre- monitions that his adored son would grow up to become a wandering itinerant preacher. Maybe as she pondered all these things in her heart, mother Mary had hunches her tiny beloved bundle soon enough would declare, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20). Fully one of us, God has come to save our kind and to embrace the whole cosmos. This God of grand compas- sion is prepared to go the distance with and for us. Even as we adore a newborn baby away in a manger, we know in our hearts that on a hill far away stands an old rugged cross. As the much-revered U.N. leader Dag Hammar- skjöld wrote in his Markings journal more than a half- century ago: “For the person who looks to the future, the manger is on Golgotha; the cross has already been raised in Bethlehem.”
In our earthly campground, where many of us find
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