Eight days later, when the baby was circumcised, he was named Jesus, the name given him by the angel even before he was conceived. (Luke 2:21)The baby is born, the shepherds come and worship and maybe the wisemen. The next day, things are back to normal.
Joseph is a new father, Mary is a new mother and is sore from the delivery, the baby needs feeding and his diaper changed.
The animals are still eating, the census is still going on, the sun is still shining, the dust is still blowing, people are still being born and dying, and the King has come.
We tend to think about the earth shifting on its axis when Jesus was born, that everybody on earth felt a tremor in the ground at the moment of his birth. But they didn’t. And the earth didn’t shake.
Romans 8:22 says: all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. And it had been and still is. When Jesus was born, the whole creation shifted on a different level. Now the King was here and things would be different.
But the groaning is still going on in our own lives and in the lives of those yet to come. When Jesus came, it changed everything on a spiritual level. But not necessarily on a physical level.
Life went on. People were still being born and dying.
The birth of Jesus was so ordinary. The conception was miraculous but the birth was ordinary. The life was ordinary. His death, although undeserved and brutal was ordinary to a point. He was not the first nor the last to be crucified.
The difference between him and all the rest was the resurrection. By his resurrection he showed himself to be extra-ordinary.
But there was nothing really all that special about his birth. And God meant it that way.
It even could have been that Mary and Joseph were expecting something amazing to happen, but the baby just lay there and slept. And gooed. And wiggled. And cried. And messed his pants. And finally walked, and ate solid food, and learned to play games, and grew.
Nothing special, except maybe for the time he was twelve in the temple. Otherwise, it was just a kid growing up in a family.
But what a kid. One who was the King of Kings and Lord of Lords incognito. I don’t think he even knew it himself until that day of his baptism when he went into the wilderness for forty days.
Just an ordinary kid with an extraordinary mission: to seek and save those who were lost.
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