Just a baby boy

The bible starts us off today:

In Isiah 52 we read: "Just watch my servant blossom! Exalted, tall, head and shoulders above the crowd! And he didn't begin that way. At first everyone was appalled. He didn't even look human -- a ruined face, disfigured past recognition. Nations all over the word will be in awe, taken aback, kings shocked into silence when they see him. For what was unheard of they'll see with their own eyes, what was unthinkable they'll have right before them."

But he was just a baby in swaddling clothes, wasn't he? Don't we even get a few minutes with the squeeking little baby boy before some jerk reminds us of what is to come? Do we get a few heartfilled moments with the baby before somebody reminds us of the man's pain?

No, and no.

For to forget for just a moment the intensity of what was to come for this baby boy is to forget just why he came in the first place. He came, to die -- for you, for me, for us, for us all.

The next lines of scripture tells us: Who believes what we've heard and seen? Who would have thought God's saving power would look like this? The servant grew up before God -- a scrawny seedling, a scrubby plant in a parched field.

The baby, who barely escaped death in a manager (for after all, there was no one there to assist in child birth and conditions were hardly those of a neo-natal birth hospital), then barely escaped a blood-thirsty king who wanted the child dead before he was two years of age, grew up before God's watchful eye.

"There was nothing attractive about him, nothing to cause us to take a second look. He was looked down on and passed over, aman who suffered, who knew pain first hand. One look and people turned away. We looked down on him, thought he was scum."

The tales of the baby being born in a manager might inspire today, but one suspects they were tales that were used ot make fun of him when he was a child. "Oh, you didn't even have a place booked for your wife? What's the matter, Jesus, doesn't your family have any money?" We don't even known when his step-father, Joseph, passed. That too must have been a source of amusement for those kids he had to play with. No daddy in a time when men meant everything.

But then the line of scripture tells why he came and it overwhelms our senses: "But the fact is, it was our pains he carried -- our disfigurements, all the things wrong with us. We thought he brought it on himself, that God was punishing him for his own failures. But it was our sins that did that to him -- that ripped and tore and curshed him -- our sins.

Today as you go to buy that one more glorious present for that one more wonderful person in your close family, try, try, try to remember why we do all this. Why do we raise the limits on our credit cards? Why do we go deeper in debt?

Could it be because "He took the punishment, and that made us whole. Through his bruises we get healed.

Even as a child, I wonder if Jesus knew? Like Nixon in the past, I wonder this: when did he know and what did he know?

Could it be that the diety in him knew all the human's life what his purpose was? Imagine the pain and burden of carrying that?

He was just a baby boy.

For only so long.