Light in the Darkness: Then and Now!

Did Mary enjoy the stable turned maternity ward? Was it fun to give birth to a baby on a winter night with cow dung, and a cattle eating trough for the baby’s cot? Was it fun to be rejected accommodation in the local “donkels”?

Had God made a mistake supernaturally to cause the Virgin’s pregnancy when Caesar Augustus was flying with his imperial agenda? By no means! Could he not at least have made an advance booking? Yet this was part of the whole paradox. The Son of God deliberately entered darkness in order to shine his light. He came to identify with the poor, the displaced, the rejected and the lost.

He was destined to be born in the City of David, Bethlehem, and that is where he would be born if it were today! His family lived at Nazareth in Galilee, so the Father needed a strategy to get them to Bethlehem before the birth.

Jesus then grew up in Nazareth. Although he grew up in “the Promised Land” of the Old Testament, it was already a multi-cultural society. He grew up with Palestinians and with Greeks, and it was no part of the divine plan of those days to deny these groups the right to live there with Jews. Next to the town of Nazareth was the Hellenistic town of Sepharis. Herod the Great had built Olympic gymnasiums and other public buildings in Palestine, in Judaea and other countries as well. The idea that geographic Israel was for Jews only was long dead by the time of Jesus!

Luke’s Gospel (Luke 2: 32) tells us that Jesus came to be a light to the nations (the Gentiles) and also to be the glory of his people Israel.

John 1:1-18 tells us that the light that lightens every person was coming into the world (which he had originally made), but that the world “knew him not”. However, to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the power to become the children of God. We are either Jews or Gentiles, and some may be a mixture. Ultimately the difference does not matter. God wants us to be permanently discipled by the Messiah. He also wants us to be disciple makers ourselves.

Lindsay Johnstone

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