God is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:

When God chooses Mary as the means when God himself wants to come into the world in the manger of Bethlehem, this is not an idyllic family affair. It is instead the beginning of a complete reversal, a new ordering of all things on this earth. If we want to participate in this Advent and Christmas event, we cannot simply sit there like spectators in a theater and enjoy all the friendly pictures. Rather, we must join in the action that is taking place and be drawn into this reversal of all things ourselves. Here we too must act on the stage, for here the spectator is always a person acting in the drama. We cannot remove ourselves from the action.

With whom, then, are we acting? Pious shepherds who are on their knees? Kings who bring their gifts? What is going on here, where Mary becomes the mother of God, where God comes into the world in the lowliness of the manger? World judgment and world redemption—that is what’s happening here. And it is the Christ child in the manger himself who holds world judgment and world redemption. He pushes back the high and mighty; he overturns the thrones of the powerful; he humbles the haughty; his arm exercises power over all the high and mighty; he lifts what is lowly, and makes it great and glorious in his mercy.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer – Poem written in Tegel Prison (1944)
Close to you I waken in the dead of night,
And start with fear—are you lost to me once more?
Is it always vainly that I seek you, you, my past?
I stretch my hands out,
and I pray—
and a new thing now I hear;
“The past will come to you once more,
and be your life’s enduring part, through thanks and repentance.
Feel in the past God’s deliverance and goodness,
Pray him to keep you today and tomorrow.

Further Reading: John 3:16-21

Adapted from Adapted from Bonhoeffer, D. (2010). God is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas. (J. Riess, Ed., O. C. Dean Jr., Trans.) (First edition, pp. 42-43). Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press