A baby changes everything

“Actually, we are,” answered the new father who with his wife had welcomed their first child a couple of months ago. I had asked him, “Are you getting much sleep?” “She’s a good baby,” he said, “but having a child sure changes things.” Isn’t that the truth? A baby turns the regular schedule upside down and focuses the attention and requires the energies of the new parents in ways they never imagined. And a baby changes things for a long time, even and especially when he or she grows up.

At Christmas we celebrate the birth of a long-awaited baby whose life turned the world upside down at his birth and, especially, when he grew up. On the second Sunday of Advent, my wife and I watched the children of the Wallace Presbyterian Church tell the Christmas story from the shepherds’ perspective through scripture, readings, and songs. They did a good job sharing how the shepherds were going about their regular business when the angels appeared and proclaimed the astounding news of a baby being born in Bethlehem. They sang the comforting carol “Away in a Manger,” which we love to hear as we focus on the joy a newborn baby brings.

But, as almost all babies do, that baby grew up and what he did challenged the status quo of his world and the world at large. Before he was born, his mother sang about how, through this baby, God would bring down the powerful from their thrones and lift up the lowly, fill the hungry with good things, and send the rich away empty. A week after he was born, an old prophet told the mother that her baby was “destined for the falling and rising of many and to be a sign that will be opposed, so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.”

Ominously, the old man warned, “And a sword will pierce your own soul too.” Surely that was the case as Mary watched her child grow up, find his calling, and be rejected and killed. In a Zoom Bible study recently, the leader was talking about the verses in Isaiah which we commonly hear during the weeks before Christmas, either in Advent worship or in Handel’s Messiah: “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us.” She referred to this as the inversion of Christmas.

No one 2,000 years ago or still today would expect a child to bring about such radical changes as Jesus did. To be honest, most of us are more comfortable thinking about the sweet baby Jesus away in a manger than the Jesus who turned over the tables in the temple, called (and calls) people to follow where he leads, shows a way different from the way things always have been, and lays claim to all of life.

Yet, just as Mary pondered everything the shepherds told her about her baby, we should think deeply about this baby who grew up and changed things. Merry Christmas!

Philip Gladden is a retired Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) minister who lives in Wallace, NC. He can be reached at gladdenphilip620@gmail.com.