Snake-bitten
I ask you to take a look at the icon of the Nativity. It is such a beautiful depiction of the Prince of Peace and His entrance into our world as a newborn babe. It is an image of perfect calm, perfect radiance, perfect purity.
If there are any fathers here who were present in the delivery room for the birth of a child, I know that you will concur with me that this icon evokes not a single memory of the experience.
Witnessing a child being born is not at all like watching the Sunday School Christmas play; it’s very much like watching a movie that’s a cross between Alien and The Exorcist.
And in my house we still laugh to this day over some … choice instructions that my lovely and demure wife issued to me during childbirth.
But the icon of the Nativity depicts something different from our ordinary experience. All is calm, all is bright. We see the Holy Mother with three stars on her cowl, to indicate that she is Ever-Virgin—before giving birth, in the course of giving birth, and after giving birth.
This is a statement not about her—at least, not first of all about her. It is a statement about Him, her child Jesus. It is a statement about His power to heal, and to heal all things, even the inevitable, unavoidable injuries that come to a mother in the process of giving birth. If He, as an infant, can heal His mother even as she brings Him into the world, He can heal anyone of anything, if He so wills. He is, as the prophet Malachi foresaw, “the Sun of righteousness, risen with healing in his wings.”
In the early Church, the Greek-speaking Christians were fascinated by the name God gave His Son in the flesh. For Yeshuah in Hebrew comes over into Greek as Iesous, which sounds like a name from the ancient verb “to heal,” iaso or ieso. To the Greek ear, the name of the Savior was “Healer.” And the experience of many of the martyrs was that Christ could heal every wound inflicted on them, even the seemingly fatal ones, and render them free from the pain of their struggles for His sake.
When we look at the icon of the Nativity, then, we are not looking at a dingy stable with a grubby manger used by filthy animals. We see a doctor’s office, a medical clinic, a place of healing and restoration—not just for a virgin mother, but for all mankind.
And it is a clinic that specializes above all in a particular type of wound—the wound that we all have. We are all suffering from snakebite.
I am not talking about a bite from an ordinary snake, of course. Not a rattlesnake or a cottonmouth or even a basilisk. I am talking about the bite of that serpent in the garden of Eden, the serpent that passed his disease on to Eve and to Adam and to all of us.
Ordinary snakes can’t transmit rabies. But that serpent, that subtle, sly creature—he had a form of spiritual rabies, and he passed the illness on to the human race. Before Eve took her first bite of forbidden fruit, the serpent had already inflicted his spiritual infection on her soul. You see that in the exaggerations of their short conversation.
His disease was the disease of pride. Not the good kind of pride, which is rejoicing in oneself as something that the good God created in wisdom.
No, his disease was the sickness of wounded pride, the pride that comes with indignation and resentment and a sense of unmet entitlement. This wounded pride was the fall of Lucifer, and this wounded pride was what he transmitted to us. It is the pride that says, “I would make a better god than God, because I know better how this world ought to be run, I know better what I really deserve, and I know better what you deserve—the fruit of any tree you wish ...”
It was in that wounded pride that Eve reached for the fruit; and in that wounded pride that guilty Adam blamed God for making Eve; and in that wounded pride that Cain slew Abel; and in that wounded pride that Pharaoh would not let God’s people go; and in that wounded pride that Herod sent his soldiers to kill every baby boy in Bethlehem under the age of two.
That same old venom, that same old snakebite—that is the source of all sin, all conflict, all strife.
But in the icon of the Nativity we see the cure. We see a medicine come into the world like a priceless serum that stops the snakebite.
It is the medicine of humility. When the Son of God put aside the glories of eternal divinity to come into our lowly dimensions, He brought the cure.
We see His medicine at work in His earthly father. Who, when told by the angel that his fiancée was pregnant by God’s design, Joseph did not, in wounded pride, object that it wasn’t fair, that the world would look at him as a lothario or a cuckold. No, he accepted the plan and stayed just and true to his promise.
We see the medicine of humility at work in Christ’s mother. Who, when she learned that a long trip from Galilee to Bethlehem would be required during her pregnancy, she did not raise a stink about the discomfort and inconvenience, because, after all, she was the Mother of God. No, she sensed that the Roman taxation was part of a bigger plan, as indeed it was, for the fulfillment of prophesy.
We see the medicine of humility most of all in the Son of God. Who, though He is by nature King of kings and Lord of lords, who being in the form of God, thought of his equality with God not as a thing to be held on to, but let go of it completely. He chose to be born, not in a royal palace or a pristine temple, but in the place of an outcast, in a dank and cave-like stable, wrapped in the swaddling bands of newborn lambs, and laid in the feeding trough of an unwashed animal. Nor would this be the limit of His humility, as we will see in days to come.
Our fatal wound, our original sin, if you will, is that resentful, wounded pride. Our salvation is the condescension, the lowliness, the humility of God appearing in the flesh, appearing as one of us, looking like just another flawed and fragile human being, and yet to be our perfect sacrifice, our food and drink, our medicine of immortality.
We have such need of a Savior. This world bristles with wounded pride and indignation and resentment and jealousy and spite. Through the mercies of our all-condescending God, may we all be found, more and more, in “stable” condition—humble, meek, and content in all things according to the will of God.
This is the message of the icon of the Nativity; and in this hope, only and always, can we have a Merry Christmas.