From the editor

Look, the virgin shall conceive
and bear a son,
and they shall name him
Emmanuel.—Matthew 1:23

The infant lying in the manger is God’s body. That’s what “Emmanuel” means. The Hebrew word is, literally, “God with us.”

The Isaiah prophecy quoted by Matthew is also specific that God will be with us as a son. But we seldom consider the meaning of sonship in the Ancient Near Eastern world into which Jesus was born.

In that time and culture, a man’s “essence” continued to live on in his son, especially a firstborn son. That is why it was such a big deal that Abraham had no son. It meant that his line would stop and there would be no trace of him in the world.

This was so important to Abraham and Sarah that they conceived a work-around. Sarah told Abraham to take her servant, Hagar, and father a son through her. So this is how Ishmael came into the world and was to represent the “essence” of Abraham for all eternity.

But when Sarah became pregnant and bore Abraham a son, suddenly the boy Ishmael was a threat to Isaac. There could be only one son to carry Abraham into the future. So Hagar and Ishmael were driven away.

We know that in Islam much more was written about their lives than we have in our biblical record. And this is how Abraham became the father of not just one faith but three—Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

At Christmas time, when we again hear the story of Jesus’ Nativity, imagine that infant lying in a manger as the essence of God wrapped in swaddling clothes.

This is a phenomenon almost too big to imagine: The all-powerful, all-loving Creator of the universe was embodied in that tiny little boy, the essence of God.

The phrase “son of God” is never used in the Old Testament. But 41 times the writers of the New Testament books use it to describe Jesus. By doing so, their readers understood the “sonship” dynamic between Jahweh God and Jesus the Messiah.

Conversely, when Jesus gave us the Lord’s Prayer, he was using code language for “our Father” that carried with it the same organic and essence connection between a father and a firstborn son.

In a church that increasingly neuters the language of masculine references in order to be inclusive, we miss the powerful relationship between God the Father and Jesus the Son.

But at Christmas time, we can celebrate the birth of God’s “only begotten son,” who came into the world because our Father so loved us. Or, as Gordon Houser says: “When you dig through the consumerist clutter that Christmas has become, you get to a startling belief: at a point in real history, God became a baby.”