Edmond A. Steimle speaks of the birth of Jesus as the eye of the storm:
Before his birth the stories of violence abound. There’s the devastation of the floor, in which God expressed his anger at a people whose every act and action was a reflection of evil. There was God’s anger at the golden calf the Israelites constructed while Moses was receiving the commandments on the mountain. Then Jerusalem is destroyed and the chosen of God are exiled to Babylon. There’s the story of Jonah desperately trying to get away from God. There’s the oppressive religious life brought on by the legalism of the Pharisees. And then the Romans came and made these once proud people a subject nation.
And then Jesus is born. For a night, a week, a month, we don’t know how long, but it was seemingly momentary, there was peace. Then came the slaughter of all the male children under two years of age because Herod was scared. There’s some hints that as he grew up some people in his hometown and his family thought him a little nuts. When he tried to preach his hometown elders threw him out of the synagogue. Then there were the sinister plots to get rid of him; there’s the angry mob which cried for his blood. And in the end there’s death, death by crucifixion on a Roman cross.
These, Steimle points out, are not children’s stories. These are adult tales of the evil in the world and the destruction evil does. But we have turned them into children’s stories over the ages. By doing so, we do not have to deal with them as adults.
Jesus lived in a real world. Jesus taught, preached, healed, and performed the miracles in a real world. These are stories for real people in that real world. These are stories for you. You should read them again sometime, not in a cratoon fashion with your children, but in the reality of his and your world.
Come Lord come, and make this faith I profess real in this harsh and intruding world in which I love. Amen.
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