Travail and Tenderness
And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.
Luke 2:7
And she brought forth her firstborn Son- I don’t suppose we need the grisly details, but the single line offered is understated. If you’ve given birth or been present for one, you know there’s a little more to it than just bringing one forth like whipping out a pack of bubblegum. Travail is synonymous with childbirth. It’s a screaming, bloody, painful affair accentuated by a final still tenderness. It would be no less with the birth of Christ. Oh yes, the cattle were lowing, the sheep bleating, and the stars twinkled magically above, but Mary travailed in agony. She brought him forth, and in tenderness she wrapped him in the dedicated cloths she assuredly brought with her from Nazareth for the occasion. Fully spent, in her exhaustion, she would lay him in the rough-hewn trough, whether stone or wood. Nothing about the odd displacement and circumstance was proper or predictable, save the travail, the tenderness, and the swaddling. A foreshadowing to be sure.
Some thirty odd years later, Mary would stand witness to another screaming, bloody, and painful affair, another unnatural travailing to bring her low and spent. The only innocent man, birthed of Mary, begotten of the Father, would suffer in an anomalous displacement and circumstance. The same stars would stare down, but their magic would be menace. Any lowing, the groans and gurgled rasps of criminals rather than cattle. Bleating jeers and heckles would rise from conspirators and creeps. The wrath of the Father dispensed in both an abandonment and assent to all of Satan’s fury commingled with His own.
Yet, good news of great joy for all people would be no less the pronouncement from heaven, though realized in a death. An agonizing end, to birth another beginning. Pastoral peace on earth would yield to darkened skies and quaking ground, piercing spear and bone-smash hammer. The weight of sin would crash down like the primal roar of a laboring mother. And then quiet. Friends would take a limp and lifeless body down from rough-hewn beams, and wrap it tenderly in the linen cloths set apart for the occasion.
A birth, a death, a travail, a tenderness.
Our lives are marked by both travailing and tenderness, each in its time. Do you see the mercies of our Father through both in your life?
Do you gaze upon Christ in His fullness of expression toward you? Born, buried, and resurrected to give you life.
