In “Away in a Manger” we sing “the little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes,” but I doubt it’s true. And I hope it’s not true. It’s meant as nothing more serious than an expression of children’s piety, but doctrinally we don’t want to draw back an inch from the implications of the communicatio idiomatum, the full exchange between Christ’s human and divine natures. Anything less, Luther passionately argued, and our salvation is a lie.

I am feeling particularly grateful for the incarnation and the attendant communicatio idiomatum this Christmas. At the beginning of December I had an invasive surgery that has left me still, three and a half weeks later, exhausted, bent over, aching, and weak. I’m certainly better than I was and have every prospect of a full recovery. But the whole experience, and especially the first few days after the operation, brought me to a new frontier of physical pain I’d never known before. And it certainly wasn’t the limit of physical pain; human beings can and do endure far worse.

What to do when all you do is hurt? Prayer comes more naturally than at any other time. I found, though, that it was not so much the act of praying that brought comfort, but a new and acute awareness of Who I was praying to. My Lord is not a God Who remains aloof, granting mercy or relief from a safe distance. My Lord does not look upon the physical state of His creatures as itself a punishment to be escaped in the afterlife, with pain as an inevitable consequence of material fallenness. My Lord has known pain—far greater than mine—in his own divine and human body; He undertook it willingly, graciously. When He hears my prayers springing from my own pain, He doesn’t listen with an above-it-all sublimity, granting relief like a fat king on a cozy throne to a peasant beset with petty woes. My Lord knows what it’s like and so I can truly trust him with my prayers. I had never realized that so acutely and personally before.

Popular observance of Christmas has a marked preference for the joyful and family goodwill—with good reason—but steers clear of the purpose of the birth of the baby in the first place, namely to conduct a ministry that would lead to death on the cross. But the incarnation that became public in Bethlehem happened at all in order to do something with human suffering, to take it into God’s own being, and so to overcome it in the resurrection. Each moment in the life of Jesus our Lord is connected to every other: Good Friday and Easter Sunday subsist in Christmas Day too.

A very blessed Nativity of our Lord to you and yours!