I hope these images will help you contemplate Christmas, complete a sermon, or come close to the feet of Jesus in worship.
A commando in enemy territory
In my mind’s eye, on Christmas Eve I see a single commando tumbling out of the bomb bay doors of a B-52 at 30,000 feet. He falls silently in the midnight darkness into enemy territory. Satan sleeps, not knowing that he will organize a rebellion. The empire of sin will fall, not from without, but from within. … Like a commando severely hurt as he landed from far above, who has no apparent capacity to mount an effective action, or for that matter any action at all, the powerless infant turns his face to ours and makes what, in that obscure stable, seems like a crazy, impossible demand: “Join me.”- R. R. Reno, Christmas Draws Near
A King entering a city
You know how it is when some great king enters a large city and dwells in one of its houses; because of his dwelling in that single house, the whole city is honored, and enemies and robbers cease to molest it. Even so is it with the King of all; He has come into our country and dwelt in one body amidst the many, and in consequence the designs of the enemy against mankind have been foiled and the corruption of death, which formerly held them in its power, has simply ceased to be. For the human race would have perished utterly had not the Lord and Savior of all, the Son of God, come among us to put an end to death. – St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation
Life in a prison cell
Life in a prison cell may well be compared to Advent: one waits, hopes, and does this, that, or the other—things that are really of no consequence—the door is shut, and can only be opened from the outside. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God is in the Manger [I used this image in my 2012 Christmas Eve Sermon on John 1:1-14]
Christ has come uninvited
Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because He cannot be at home in it, because He is out of place in it, and yet He must be in it, His place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in the world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst… It is in these that He hides Himself, for whom there is no room. – Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable
The second Adam
How can the human race be rescued out of rebellion and avoid inevitable condemnation when everyone, without exception, is bound under sin? The only way is to bring another Adam into the world; someone who, like that first Adam, was without sin and who could once again have the choice to obey or disobey, but this time get it right. In other words, there had to be a way to go back and rewrite that first chapter of the human story recorded in Genesis chapter three on the Fall of Man. – Tim Tennent, Thirty Questions: A Short Catechism of the Christian Faith
Moving into the neighborhood
The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood. – John 14:1, The Message
The climbing down of God
The nativity mystery’ means that God became human, truly human out of his own grace. The miracle of the existence of Jesus, his ‘climbing down of God’ is Holy Spirit and Mary! Here is a human being, the Virgin Mary, and as he comes from God, Jesus comes from this human being. Born of Mary means a human origin for God. Jesus Christ is not only truly God; he is human like every one of us. He is human without limitation. Not only similar to us, he is like us. – Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline
A free act enabled by grace
The virginal conception occurred entirely by consent, not coercion. The virgin Mother was receptive to the divine address. As the incarnation of the Son was voluntary, so was the virginal conception. Mary was willing to be the human bodily means by which the Word became flesh, even as the Son assumed flesh voluntarily. As the Savior’s conception was voluntary but without works of merit by grace, so is the believer’s new birth into the Christian life voluntary yet entirely by grace. Mary consented without impairment of the liberty that made her human. “It was only after having instructed her and persuaded her that God took her for His Mother and borrowed from her the flesh that She so greatly wished to lend Him” (Cabasilas, “Homilies Mariales Byzantines,” Patrologia orientalis 19, 3). – Thomas Oden, Classic Christianity
