God in a Cave

(Christmas Meditation)

GOD IN A CAVE

Those who study such things closely insist that the manger of Jesus’ birth was in a café and not in a barn-like structure.  It really doesn’t matter.  But there is something fanciful in the thought of His coming as a cave-dweller.  We are reminded of those cavemen of ancient history of whom we find traces by finding drawings of animals on the walls of their former homes.

And now we have another drawer of animals.  He who traced the shape of animals and man and brought them to life now is found in a cave Himself.  What a paradox!  That the hands that had made the sun and stars were now too small to reach the heads of the cattle.  Upon this paradox all of our faith is built.  It is such an extreme conjunction.  The world creator and a baby boy, Omnipotence and impotence, divinity and infancy.  It is such a remarkable combination that a million repetitions cannot make it sound trite or common.  Perhaps it is one of the few circumstances qualifying for the title “unique”.  (cf., G.K. Chesterton:  Orthodoxy).

The common man has been wrong in many things throughout history and has been scorned by the educated cosmopolitans who deal with lofty thoughts and cold reasonings and logical conclusions and unfathomable abstractions.  But the common man was close to being correct when in his pagan worship he had been promoting the idea that divinity could be seen and could live in the limits of time and space.  For in the cave where the manger was, God was dwelling.  God in a cave.  A revolution, the world turned upside down.  For Heaven was under earth.