Three Meditations on the Nativity

[Geee]

National Review:

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And all went to be enrolled, each to his own city. — Luke 2:1–3

 

The beginning of Saint Luke’s account of the Nativity often gets homiletic short shrift, preachers passing it by as if it were merely Lucan throat-clearing. Yet those three brief sentences (especially when read in the context of the evangelist’s promise to make his gospel “an orderly account” [Luke 1:3]) take readers of the Christmas story to the very heart of the Christian claim — a claim that is increasingly countercultural in our increasingly Gnostic age of competing “spiritualities.”

 

Those “spiritualities” usually involve the human search for God, which easily drifts off into the mythological, the fantastic, or the purely subjective. Biblical religion, which from a Christian point of view reaches a particularly poignant moment at the Nativity, is something entirely different. Biblical religion is about God’s search for us, and our learning to take the same path through history that God is taking.