God Contracted to a Span: The Infinite Made Infintessimally Small [1]

’Twas much that man
was made like God before,
But that God should be made like man—
much more. ~John Donne

Scripture: Micah 4:6–8; Luke 2:8–20

Micah predicted that the announcement of Messiah’s birth would be delivered at Migdol-Eder (“the Watch-Tower of the Flock”), traditionally identified as the shepherd’s field a few thousand yards north of Bethlehem.

The messenger passed by Jerusalem, where the scholars and clergy of the day were ensconced. He passed by Herodium, Herod’s villa near Bethlehem, and appeared instead to a group of shepherds squatting around a campfire, telling lies, passing a wineskin, and passing the long, cold night away.

Back then no one would have thought that God would be interested in shepherds or that shepherds would be interested in God. Shepherds were notoriously irreligious, driven by macho relish and more like Owyhee County buckeroos than the sanitized shepherds we associate with the story these days. Ranked by the rabbis with prostitutes and other “habitual sinners,” they were outcasts, rejects, pariahs, barred from synagogue and polite society. [2] They assumed that God would never take a liking to the likes of them and feared Him in the worst possible way.

But God never wastes His words. He only speaks to those who want to hear what He has to say. He knew that these shepherds, beneath their hard exteriors and seeming indifference to spiritual things, quietly longed for someone to save them.

It’s true of us, you know, no matter how tough we try to be. Sooner or later we run out of something essential—love, money, time, or life. Isolation, loneliness, impotence, and fear of death may lead us to acknowledge our need for a Savior. But where can we find Him?

The angel’s words were simple and direct: “Today in the city of David a Savior has been born for you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in strips of cloth and lying in a manger.”

A “Savior born for you.” This was good news that brought the shepherds great joy! But where would they find him? “In a manger—a feed trough.” This was the sign.

And so the shepherds went off in search of their Savior, not bothering to look in Herod’s villa, for there were no feed troughs there. They skirted the resorts, the spas, the lodges of the rich and famous and went looking instead for a feedlot, a stockyard, or one of the damp and dirty caves in ground into which shepherds drove their flocks at night. There in the mud and dung, in a cave where Joseph and Mary had crept to find shelter from the cold, they found a helpless infant, with unfocused eyes and uncontrolled limbs, needing to be cuddled and cared for, made terribly vulnerable, humble and exceedingly small; the God-baby in the straw; God in a form that no one could possibly fear.

The feed trough was no afterthought. All along God had been doing His best to humble himself in order to assure us of His love. But nothing can match what happened that night in the cave. There the Savior was born among “the sweet breath and steaming dung of beasts and nothing is ever the same again . . . Once [we] have seen him in a stable, [we] can never be sure where he will appear, or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of man . . .” (Fredrick Buechner, The Hungering Dark).

“Wild pursuit” indeed! Micah’s point exactly: “In that day,” declares the LORD, “I will . . . gather the outcasts” (Micah 4:6, emphasis added).

1 G. K. Chesterton
2 Rabbi Jose bar Hanina, in his Midrash on Psalm 23 said, “In the whole world you will find no occupation more despised than the shepherd.”