I am reading
the book ‘Life of Christ’ by Bishop Fulton J Sheen, published in 1959, and find
it spiritually informative and refreshing in this age of the diabolically
inspired ‘Great Reset’ agenda. I hope that you too share my feelings.
'The
Early Life of Christ'
Bethlehem.
Caesar Augustus,
the master book-keeper of the world, sat in his palace by the Tiber. Before him was stretched a map labelled
‘Orbis Terrarum, Imperium Romanum’. He was about to issue an order for a census
of the world; for all the nations of the civilised world were subject to
Rome. There was only one capital in this
world: Rome; only one official language: Latin; only one ruler: Caesar. To
every outpost, to every satrap and governor, the order went out: every Roman subject must be enrolled in his
own city. On the fringe of the Empire, in the little village of Nazareth,
soldiers tacked up on walls the order for all the citizens to register in the
towns of their family origins.
Joseph, the builder, an obscure
descendant of the great King David, was obliged by that very fact to register
in Bethlehem, the city of David. In accordance with the edict, Mary and Joseph
set out from the village of Nazareth for the village of Bethlehem, which lies
about five miles on the other side of Jerusalem. Five hundred years earlier the prophet
Micheas had prophesied concerning that little village:
And thou, Bethlehem, of the land of Juda,
Art far from the least among the
princes of Juda,
For out of thee will arise a leader who is to
be
The shepherd of my people Israel.
Mathew 2:6
Joseph was full of
expectancy as he entered the city of his family and was quite convinced that he
would have no difficulty in finding lodgings for Mary, particularly on account
of her condition. Joseph went from house
to house only to find each one crowded.
He searched in vain for a place where He, to Whom heaven and earth
belonged, might be born. Could it be
that the Creator would not find a home in creation? Up a steep hill Joseph climbed to a faint
light which swung on a rope across a doorway.
This would be the village inn.
There, above all other places, he would surely find shelter. There was a
room in the inn for the soldiers of Rome who had brutally subjugated the Jewish
people; there was room for the daughters
of the rich merchants of the East; there was room for those clothed in soft
garments, who lived in the houses of the king; in fact, there was room for
anyone who had a coin to give the inn-keeper; but there was no room for Him who
came to be the Inn of every homeless heart in the world. When finally, the scrolls of history are
completed down to the last words in time, the saddest line of all will be:
‘There was no room in the inn.’
Out to the hillside to a stable cave, where shepherds
sometimes drove their flocks in time of storm, Joseph and Mary went at last for
shelter. There, in a place of peace in
the lonely abandonment of a cold windswept cave; there, under the floor of the
world, He Who is born without a mother in heaven, is born without a father on earth.
Of every other child that is born into the world, friends
can say that he resembles his mother.
This was the first instance in time that anyone could say that the
mother resembled the Child. This is the
beautiful paradox of the Child Who made His mother; the mother too, was only a
child. It was also the first time in the
history of this world that anyone could ever think of heaven as being anywhere
else than ‘somewhere up there’; when the Child was in her arms, Mary now looked
down to Heaven.
In the filthiest place in the world, a stable, Purity was
born. He Who was later to be slaughtered
by men acting as beasts, was born among beasts. He Who would call Himself the
‘living Bread descended from Heaven’, was laid in a manger, literally – a place
to eat. Centuries before, the Jews had
worshipped the golden calf, and the Greeks, the ass. Men bowed down before them as before God. The ox and the ass now were present to make
their innocent reparation, bowing down before their God.
There was no room in the inn, but there was room in the
stable. The inn is the gathering place of public opinion, the focal point of
the world’s moods, the rendezvous of the worldly, the rallying place of the
popular and the successful. But the
stable is a place for the outcasts, the ignored, the forgotten. The world might
have expected the Son of God to be born - if He was to be born at all - in an
inn. A stable would be the last place in the world where one would have looked
for Him. Divinity is always where one
least expects to find it.
No worldly mind would ever have suspected that He Who
could make the sun warm the earth, would one day have need of an ox and an ass
to warm Him with their breath; that He Who, in the language of scripture, could
stop the turning about of Arcturus, would have His birthplace dictated by an
imperial census; that He Who clothed the fields with grass, would Himself be
naked; that He, from Whose hands came planets and worlds, would one day have
tiny arms that were not long enough to touch the huge heads of the cattle: that
the feet which trod the everlasting hills would one day be too weak to walk;
that the Eternal Word would be dumb; that omnipotence would be wrapped in
swaddling clothes; that Salvation would lie in a manger; that the bird which
built the nest would be hatched therein – no one would ever have suspected that
God coming to this earth would ever be so helpless. And that is precisely why so many miss Him. Divinity is always where one least expects
to find it.
The Son of God made man was invited to enter His own
world through a back door. Exiled from the earth, He was born under the earth,
in a sense, the first Cave Man in recorded history. There He shook the earth to
its very foundations. Because He was born
in a cave, all who wish to see Him must stoop. To stoop is the mark of
humility. The proud refuse to stoop and,
therefore, they miss Divinity. Those however, who bend their egos and enter,
find that they are not in a cave at all, but in a new universe where sits a
Babe on His mother’s lap, with the world poised on His fingers.
The manger and the Cross now stand at the two extremities
of the Saviour’s life! He accepted the
manger because there was no room in the Inn; He accepted the Cross because men
said, ‘We will not have this man for our king.’ Disowned upon entering,
rejected upon leaving. He was laid in a
stranger’s stable at the beginning, and a stranger’s grave at the end. An ox and an ass surrounded His crib at
Bethlehem; two thieves were to flank His Cross on Calvary. He was wrapped in swaddling bands in His
birthplace, He was again laid in swaddling clothes in His tomb – clothes
symbolic of the limitations imposed on His Divinity when He took a human form.
The shepherds watching their flocks nearby were told by the angels:
This is the sign by which you are to know
Him;
You will find a child still in swaddling - clothes,
Lying in a manger.
Luke 2:12
He was already bearing His Cross – the only cross a Babe could bear, a cross of poverty, exile, and limitation. His sacrificial intent already shone forth in the message the Angels sang to the hills of Bethlehem:
This day, in the city of David,
A Saviour has been born for you,
The Lord Christ himself.
Luke 2:11
Covetousness was already
being challenged by His poverty, while pride was confronted with the
humiliation of a stable. The swathing of
Divine power, which needs to accept no bounds, is often too great a tax upon
minds which think only of power. They
cannot grasp the idea of Divine condescension, or of the ‘rich man becoming
poor that through His poverty, we might be rich.’ Men shall have no greater sign of Divinity
than the absence of power as they expect it – the spectacle of a Babe Who said
He would come in the clouds of heaven, now being wrapped in the cloths of
earth.
He, Whom the angels call the ‘Son of the Highest’,
descended into the red dust from which we were all born, to be one with weak,
fallen man in all things, save sin. And
it is the swaddling-clothes which constitute His ‘sign’. If He Who is Omnipotence had come with
thunderbolts, there would have been no sign.
There is no sign unless something happens contrary to nature. The brightness of the sun is no sign, but an
eclipse is. He said that on the last
day, His coming would be heralded by ‘signs in the sun’, perhaps an extinction
of light. At Bethlehem the Divine Son went into an eclipse, so that only the
humble of spirit might recognise Him.
Only two classes of people found the Babe: the shepherds
and the Wise Men; the simple and the learned; those who knew that they knew
nothing, and those who knew that they did not know everything. He is never seen by the man of one book;
never by the man who thinks he knows.
Not even God can tell the proud anything! Only the humble can find God!
As Caryll Houselander put it, ‘Bethlehem is the inscape
of Calvary, just as the snowflake is the inscape of the universe.’ This same
idea was expressed by the poet who said that if he knew the flower in a
crannied wall in all its details, he would know ‘what God and man is’.
Scientists tell us that the atom comprehends within itself the mystery of the
solar system.
It was not so much that His birth cast a shadow on His
life, and thus led to His death; it was rather that the Cross was there from
the beginning, and it cast its shadow backward to His birth. Ordinary mortals
go from the known to the unknown submitting themselves to forces beyond their
control; hence we can speak of their ‘tragedies’. But He went from the known to
the known, from the reason for His coming, namely, to be ‘Jesus’ or ‘Saviour’,
to the fulfilment of His coming, namely, the death on the Cross. Hence, there was no tragedy in His life; for
tragedy implies the unforeseeable, the uncontrollable, and the fatalistic. Modern life is tragic when there is spiritual
darkness and unredeemable guilt. But for the Christ Child there were no
uncontrollable forces; no submission to fatalistic chains from which there
could be no escape; but there was an ‘inscape’ – the microcosmic manger summarising,
like an atom, the macrocosmic Cross on Golgotha.
In His First Advent, He took the name of Jesus, or ‘Saviour’; it will only be in His Second Advent that He will take the name of ‘Judge’. Jesus was not a name He had before He assumed a human nature; it properly refers to that which was united to His Divinity, not that which existed from all eternity. Some say ‘Jesus taught’ as they would say ‘Plato taught’, never once thinking that His name means ‘Saviour from sin’. Once He received this name, Calvary became completely a part of Him. The Shadow of the Cross that fell on His cradle also covered His naming. This was ‘His Father’s business’; everything else would be incidental to it.
(Ack. ‘The Life of Christ’ by Fulton Sheen.
Published by Peter Davies London. 1959.)
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