A Christmas Eve Reflection
Christmas Eve, 2025
The Rt. Rev. Frank S. Logue
“You will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” With these words, an angel of the Lord brought good news of great joy to all people. The divine Word, present as the Holy Trinity created the vast cosmos could never be contained by all creation. That Word made flesh would be found wrapped in bands of cloth. God became incarnate, emptying God’s own self to be born in Bethlehem. The object that gave the shepherds the key clue to finding the right newborn was “manger.” They were to discover the King of Creation by looking amongst the livestock for an infant whose parents pressed a food trough into service as a cradle.
The manger served as the fulcrum for the lever that would turn the world right-side up once more. Jesus’ mother Mary, the God bearer, made this abundantly clear in her prophetic hymn of praise, the Magnificat. Mary exults at a reversal of fortunes as God is faithful to promises made in ages past by bringing down the powerful and lifting up the lowly. The rich are sent away empty, while the hungry are filled with good things. As Jesus would later say, “The last shall be first and the first shall be last.” “The one who would be the greatest must be the servant of all.”
Mary had none of the outward appearance that those in first-century Palestine would associate with God’s blessing. She was neither rich nor had any earthly power. Yet, she sang of God’s promises being fulfilled with verbs all in the past tense. She could see clearly that, as God had noticed her and called her blessed among women, then the world was as good as turned upside down, which was to set it back as it was meant to be.
This brings to mind for me a Jewish expression captured in a hymn sung during a Passover seder, the Deyenu. The compound Hebrew word “deyenu” means “it would have been enough.” The song recounts all that God did to deliver the Hebrew people out of bondage to Pharaoh. So that one proclaims, “If God had taken us out of Egypt and not made judgments on them; it would have been enough” and continues through step by step until, “If God had brought us into the land of Israel and had not built us the Temple; it would have been enough.”
I return to this hymn in my mind again and again when something marvellous happens and I think that if this alone is all God did for me, it would have been enough. In the form of the Deyenu, “If God had allowed me to baptize this teenager and no one else, it would have been enough.” Or perhaps, “If God had let me be with this family as we prayed last rites together and nothing else, it would have been enough.”
Christmas recalls the greatest of these “it would have been enough” moments: “If God had become human in a baby found wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger; it would have been enough.” God becoming human in Jesus changed everything. The God Bearer Mary was so very right in singing that with the birth of Jesus, the world is good as turned aright once more.