Christmas Eve | Cloth

“AND SHE GAVE BIRTH TO HER FIRSTBORN SON AND WRAPPED HIM IN BANDS OF CLOTH, AND LAID HIM IN A MANGER, BECAUSE THERE WAS NO PLACE FOR THEM IN THE INN.”

LUKE 2:1-7

Can you picture Mary?  Exhausted from her trip and from childbirth, taking each strip of cloth and tenderly wrapping it around her firstborn son.  I wonder if she did so haltingly, unsure if she was getting it right.  On Christmas Eve, the full humanness of Jesus stuns me no less than when I looked at my own firstborn.  After all this waiting and a preparation that cannot really prepare us: he is finally here and oh-so-beloved.   

Mary wraps him in bands of cloth, for warmth, for security, comfort, and so much more.  Mary swaddles the baby in whom we will be clothed, all of us enveloped by the unrelenting compassion and grace of our God.  Even as we stumble and bumble, learn and fail, nothing can undo the mantle of love in which we are covered.  We see the baby Jesus wrapped by his mother in bands of cloth and know that the One she holds has the whole world in his hands; therefore we can rest secure. 

FOR REFLECTION

• What are your most vivid Christmas Eve memories? What do they mean to you?

• Have you ever swaddled a baby? Does this image speak to you of God’s love for us?

• Whenever you touch cloth today, allow it to remind you that you are clothed in Christ, wrapped in the love of God. What might that feel like?

Immanuel, God with us, our wait is over, you are here. When we picture you, wrapped in bands of cloth, resting in your mother’s arms, we marvel that you came to us so humbly, without any earthly status. You truly are fully human, intimately aware of what it means to rely on others for care, to depend on people for help, to cry and hurt, to laugh and grow. You have compassion for us because you empathize with our vulnerability. As we celebrate your birth, we rejoice that we are enveloped in your love no less than you were swaddled in the manger.

Amen.