Heavenly Peace?

When we were overwhelmed by sins, you forgaveour transgressions.

 (Ps. 65:3 NIV)

My favorite Christmas carol is “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” but I confess when I sing “How silently the wondrous gift is given” I wiggle a little bit. Rev. Phillips Brooks was a bachelor and I wonder a bit how much he knew about childbirth.

When Karen was pregnant with our first, Elizabeth, we wanted for me to be with Karen in labor and delivery. The sisters at Providence Lying-In Hospital were scandalized. One of them said to me, “Sir, you don’t want to be in the labor ward. You will hear some screams and cursing you don’t want to hear. Those girls go out of their heads.” In the end they unbent far enough for me to be with Karen in a private labor room. She didn’t scream or curse, but neither was she silent.

I doubt very much if Mary was either.

I have a similar problem with “Away in a Manger.” “The little Lord Jesus no crying he makes.”

Really?! When Peter, our third, was born, I finally made it all the way into the delivery room. Guess what? When Peter was delivered, he wanted the whole world to know that he had just come through a fiery ordeal and was not at all happy about it.

Now what is this all about? Just this: I don’t believe that  Jesus, and Mary, only first confronted  the effects of human sin on the Cross. They met it in the very hour of Jesus’ birth! Why has giving birth, or trying to, killed so many young women (walk through a cemetery and look at the ages of women buried there), and why is it such an obviously painful and risky thing for the child? It is because of sin! For God to dare to become incarnate and to ask a young girl to participate with him in the project was to come right up against sin at the outset. Pain in childbirth (for mother and child) is a result of human sin (Genesis 3:16). So Mary groaned and writhed and Jesus shrieked – for us! – for us! It was not a lovely sterile moment in a clean and lovely barn. It was struggle and weeping and blood in a dark, filthy cave. It was all that this world truly is, encapsulated in a moment in time and space – for us!