Every year at this particular season, I am amazed all over again at the impact that the old, old story of Christmas has on people. In light of how "fad-conscious" we tend to be in this country, it is a wonder to me that we have not grown weary of this ancient story and the figures of the babe and the manger and the shepherds and all the rest. After 2,000 years of exhaustive repetition, why do you suppose the events of Bethlehem still lay hold of our depths and continue to intrigue us? Is this simply the momentum of a long-established tradition, or is there another secret to this incredible vitality? In my judgment, there is more at work here than "the twitching of the dead hand of the past."

Now, to be sure, the power of tradition is present here, but alongside this, I sense another force that is much more potent; namely, a simplicity that is rooted in bottomless profundity. What you have in the Christmas story is a classic example of a reality that is at once known and yet not fully known. Here is something that can be grasped immediately and concretely by the youngest and the most profound of minds. As I have suggested in the sermon title, Bethlehem is a place where extremes meet — a coming together of opposites — and this is at least one explanation of its fantastic appeal. If either side of the matter were not present, the Christmas story would not be what it is and has been. For example, if it were only a thing of profundity and depth, little children and the great mass of people would not be affected by it, for they would not understand it.

There is no great popular devotion to Einstein's theory of relativity; for the simple reason that it is beyond the capacities of most of us to comprehend its abstractness. Profundity, without simplicity, will always be limited in its appeal. By the same token, simplicity without profundity has a relatively short life span of interest. If something can be understood completely and entirely, it soon loses its power to fascinate and intrigue. Human curiosity is ever moving on toward what it does not know and unless there is something inexhaustible in simplicity, it is bound to fade in time.

My contention is that the Christmas story is a perfect balance of these two essential factors. Call it what you will — a simple profundity or a profound simplicity — it holds in tension the immediate and the inexhaustible, the certainty of the known and the beckoning of the unknown; and this is one of the secrets of its power. Bethlehem continues to attract and to astound for the simple reason that it is the place where extremes meet, the coming together of opposites that both satisfy and intrigue. It is from this vantage point that I want us to view this morning the miracle of Bethlehem. In terms of what led up to it, the event itself, and the responses that followed it, the power of Bethlehem lies in the simplicity and profundity that come together there in an intriguing blend.

First of all, let us focus on what led up to the first Christmas, on why Mary and Joseph were in Bethlehem at all, and why the birth took place in a stable. If you look deeply into these events, what you see is the coming together of human harshness and human kindness. Both extremes were there. Most of you will probably remember that both Mary and Joseph were from Nazareth, a nondescript hill town in Galilee, some eighty or ninety miles north of Bethlehem. Why then, in those days of torturous travel, had they journeyed so far from home?

The ostensible reason was a Roman census that was being taken, which required that each man return to the place of his birth. However, this in itself does not account for why Mary was along, especially in light of her maternal condition. The census was strictly a male affair. Rome was only interested in the head of the household and his property, which included his wife, so Joseph easily could have made the journey to Bethlehem alone — in fact, most assuredly would have, if it had not been for other reasons. This brings us to what had happened months before that had set this whole chain of events into motion.

The angel Gabriel had appeared to Mary and proposed that she would be the mother of the Messiah and this would be accomplished without the agency of a human father. Just as the Spirit of God had once overshadowed the formless deep and called forth creation in the beginning (Genesis 1:1), so once again that Spirit would overshadow Mary and call forth out of her empty womb a child to be called Jesus, the Son of the Most High. This is what actually occurred, but at the time, Mary was legally engaged to Joseph but not yet married, and you can imagine the whispers that began to circulate around Nazareth as the months rolled on.

People can be cruel, you know, especially in this kind of situation, and it is not unthinkable at all that to spare Mary further embarrassment, Joseph who had himself been convinced of this story through a dream, took the occasion of the census to move her to Bethlehem and get her away from the wagging tongues of Nazareth. It was not an easy choice, for birth in that day was essentially a family and a womanly enterprise. The older women of the village, both kinspeople and friends, were the ones to be with a mother at this time, and by having to flee like a refugee to Bethlehem, Mary was thus called upon to face alone — without feminine help — her descent into the valley of the shadows of birth. She had only a man and some animals to help her. There is real pathos, then, in the fact that the event took place in Bethlehem — far away from the home out of which Mary had been driven by the harshness of people.

Yet, the fact that it took place in a stable represents the other extreme that comes together in the Bethlehem scene; namely, an act of human kindness. I am indebted to Dr. William Hull at this point, for some years ago he preached a magnificent Christmas sermon in which he challenged the traditional interpretation of that verse: "There was no room for them in the inn." Dr. Hull noted several salient facts. First, Mary and Joseph probably had been living in Bethlehem for several weeks or even months before the birth of Jesus. Luke says, "While they were there, the time came for her to be delivered" (Luke 2:6). Joseph had a trade that could be practiced anywhere, so they may well have been staying all this time in a public inn, which was a far cry from the kind of motels we have today. For one thing, there was absolutely no privacy in Palestinian hostelries. They consisted of an open courtyard where the animals and baggage stayed. Off this courtyard were little stalls where the people slept, and this was obviously a poor place for something like a birth to occur.

Dr. Hull suggests that our familiar verse ought to read: "There was no appropriate place for them in the inn," and further suggests that the innkeeper must have realized this fact and took it on himself to scout out a cave that shepherds used in the winter months to house their sheep. At this time, of course, the shepherds were "out in the fields with their flocks," so an unused cave or stable would be a place of privacy where Mary could give birth to her child in dignity. Instead of being maligned, as he has so often been in Christmas sermons, Dr. Hull suggests that the innkeeper should be praised for going out of his way to help this refugee couple in their time of need.

I find this reconstruction both intriguing and convincing, and coupled with Joseph's sensitivity to Mary, it is a blessed contrast to the harshness of Nazareth. Here, leading up to the great event of Bethlehem itself, is a meeting place of extremes — human harshness and human kindness. Human beings' inhumanity to other human beings can be great at times; yet at the same time, human beings can be very good to each other as well. How typical this is of life itself — goodness and badness, pain and pleasure, insensitivity and care, all bound up together. In Bethlehem, both the shadows and the light came together. The fact that they were there and not in Nazareth is a reminder of human harshness, but the fact that it took place in a stable, not in the inn, is a reminder of human kindness.

But let us move on now to the event itself, for here is an even greater paradox to boggle our minds and imaginations. If where all this took place can be called a meeting of extremes, the same thing can be said of what took place, only raised to infinite proportions. For here is the most startling claim ever made for any event in history; namely, that God became a human being; that divinity put on flesh and blood, that for a period of time, the invisible Creator of all things came to live on earth as a human being among human beings. G. K. Chesterton is right in calling this an "enormous exception" and something absolutely unique.

To be sure, most men had always inferred that there was some kind of Creator behind the world and they believed they had messages from him and intimations of him. But to say that he had come, himself, as a human being and lived in Palestine during the days of the Roman Empire — this was without parallel. All that other religions had ever intimated was that the Creator was present at creation. Never anywhere else had it ever been hinted that the one invisible maker of all things became a human being and dwelt on earth, but this is what Christianity claims for the event at Bethlehem!

You talk about the coming together of extremes — this is it at the ultimate level! That omnipotence would take the form of helplessness, in which the hands that made the world would become hands too small to reach beyond a crib; this staggers the imagination and confounds the mind. Yet, this is the miracle of Bethlehem, and because of it, we have that mysterious balance of knowing and yet not knowing in relation to God that is so appealing.

For you see, deep down, human beings have always longed to know the shape of the ultimate and to see the face of mystery himself; yet how could they, being mortal, limited, finite creatures that they are? How can a tiny ant begin to understand a human being in all his complexity? He simply does not have the capacity to comprehend that which is so utterly different from himself. Yet, the gap between human beings and God is even wider and more uncrossable than that between an ant and a man, for God is the uncreated one, the ultimate originator of all things, unlike us not only in complexity but also as a painter is unlike a painting. How, then, could a human being ever know that unutterable otherness called God? The truth is, on our own, we never could; we do not have the capacities.

But what if God should move from the other side? What if he, out of grace and mercy, should decide to put himself into a form we could understand? This would make God-knowledge possible, and this is exactly what happened on the first Christmas night. From the loftiest heights of unknowableness, God moved down "the stairway of the stars" and entered history in the form of a little baby. He became what we are, that we might understand what he is. He graciously put himself into a form that we humans could comprehend. The extremes met that night; divinity became humanity; and of his fullness we received, grace upon grace and truth upon truth!

There is actually no analogy for such an event; it is the paradox of all paradoxes. However, perhaps you can sense its outline a little more clearly if I compare it to one of the familiar processes of our day. By this time, we all have become accustomed to television, and you perhaps no longer even reflect on the miracle of this process. In simplest terms, what happens is that a television station sends out a signal all over the countryside, yet, it is in the form that our eyes and ears cannot pick up.

Right now in this room, at least six different types of television signals are all about us, yet we are unaware of any of them. However, if we had a television set here at the front and plugged it in and set the dials just right, a miracle of perception would take place right before our eyes. Suddenly, we would begin to see images and hear sounds. Why? Because that set was able to take those inaudible sound waves and convert them into sounds our ears could hear. It also could take those invisible image rays and transpose them into images our eyes could see. In short, by virtue of what the television set can do, what was hitherto before unavailable and inaccessible, becomes available and accessible.

Now let me say reverently and yet quite seriously that what a television set does for those inaudible, invisible television waves, the Man Jesus does for God! He is the medium by which divinity becomes knowable to humanity. He converts "the God-signal" into signals we humans can comprehend. He transposes the mystery of godness into the frequency of humanity. He became what we are, that we might understand what he is. Yes, the extremes met in Bethlehem that night, and now we have an answer to the question: "What is God like?" This is something that humans have always asked, and because of Bethlehem, we can say: "God is like Jesus." For, incredible as it may sound, this man was God — "God-come-to-us," "God-in-a-form-that-we-can-understand." And one of the reasons the story of Christmas lives on in perennial freshness is that here is an assertion that never grows old. The simplest one among us can grasp something of its meaning; the wisest among us can never exhaust it. Here the extremes meet, simplicity rooted in profundity.

But, there is one other aspect of the mystery of Christmas, and that is the response that followed the event. Phillips Brooks describes it beautifully in the words of his famous Christmas carol, "O Little Town Of Bethlehem." "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight." This is a kind of double reaction that occurred centuries ago to the coming of God in Christ. There was delirious joy both in heaven among the angels and on earth among the simple folk, like the shepherds in the field and old Anna and Simeon in the temple. One of the deepest dreams of the people had come true — that we might know what God is like and that he is with us and for us.

Yet, alongside this reaction of joy, there was a response of terror also, particularly in the regal palace of Herod the king. Something deep in the heart of this tyrant stirred that night, as if a threat to his security had arisen. When the Wise Men of the East appeared, his frenzy grew and expressed itself in a bloodbath of all the infants in Judea. The same event that carried the shepherds to the heights of joy carried Herod to the depths of fear, and this is not too hard to understand. For after all, are not each one of us ambiguous in our deepest feelings about God? We are at once attracted to him and yet repulsed by him. Part of us wants to know him — and to be guided by his truth; yet other parts of us rebel against his authority and realize that if he enters our lives, we will have to change and be judged by him and live in a different way. There is in each one of us, I think, something akin to both the heart of the shepherds and the heart of King Herod.

C. S. Lewis acknowledges this quite openly in his spiritual autobiography. On the one hand, he traces how all through his life he thirsted after the Ultimate. He wanted to know God, to learn the secret of life, to possess that supernatural joy that comes from being at one with the Father. Yet, when the real God began to make himself clearer and clearer in Christ, Lewis found himself resisting. He wanted to be left alone, to remain free to do as he pleased, to live life on his own terms. He knew instinctively that if God really entered his life, he would come as Lord, and Lewis could not remain as he had been. And so the dilemma mounted, as at one and the same time he both wanted and yet did not want. At times he felt like saying: "Oh, I hope Christ is the truth about God, and I am afraid he is not." At other times he felt like saying: "I am afraid Christ is the truth about God, but I hope he is not." So is the ambivalence of the human heart — we hunger to be in touch with the mystery of Godness, yet at the same time we fear such ultimacy. Phillips Brooks was right about Bethlehem: "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight."

And this is as good a place as I know to leave you with the Christmas story. It does have incredible power over human life, because here is where the extremes meet, where the mystery that both satisfies and intrigues is born. Here in the midst of human harshness and human kindness, God became a human being for us humans and our salvation. He became what we are — moved infinitely close — so that we could understand what he is. I wonder then: How do you react to this event? In joy or in fear? Are you like the shepherds, who found in Christ the true shepherd of their souls and were fulfilled? Or are you like King Herod, who in Christ rejected his true king and fought back? After all is said and done, this is the question posed every year at Christmas: How do you react to this God who came one night to that "little town of Bethlehem"?

Well...?

— Tom M. Garrison