In lieu of “Merry Christmas,” a couple of friends said something a little different to me this year–they told me to enjoy the celebration of God coming down to live among us in and through the flesh of a babe. I was reminded of my friends’ words as I wrapped one of the presents that several family members received from us this year, which was a picture of our daughter with a wee donkey. There’s quite a story surrounding said donkey. This animal was my late father’s last and most cherished pet; and, since we’re coming up on the 20th anniversary of Dad’s passing on from this realm, I had always assumed that his precious pet, Henry, had moved on from down here as well. I found out recently though that family members whom I hadn’t seen in a decade and a half still had Henry in their yard.
Well, the very last picture I have of my beloved father is a picture of him side by side with little Henry. So, with much help, I managed to get a picture of my own little girl, who never met her grandfather, beside his donkey in roughly the same stance Dad had beside his little buddy in that last picture of him; and then I placed both pictures in a side by side frame–an older man with a very young donkey and a younger girl with a now rather old donkey. And, as usual, once I took the time to stop rushing around and instead sit and gather my thoughts, that little donkey led me straight back to our Jesus the Christ.
If Henry had been part of the real nativity scene back in the day, he would have eaten hay right out of the bin in which baby Jesus’ body had rested. Yes, most of us probably realize that the manger was basically an animal food bowl. This fact has served to remind me of how very purposeful everything in Scripture is to and for us. We are told that Jesus is the bread of life, that his body was broken for us. In fact, those very words precede the holy sacraments (the Lord’s Supper) each time we partake in them.
The details of the real Christmas story, which can become rote and stale over time, do indeed matter. They matter on a level so profound we can scarcely take it in on this side of Heaven. As the story did unfold, Christ’s resting place could have been solely his mother’s arms or some other fixture nearby, but it wasn’t–it was on the animals’ plate. We think so much of our ourselves and of our knowledge of him at times that we forget Jesus came to and for all of us–and he did so with no pretense whatsoever. That’s one of the things about my earthly father that I love most, one way in which he pointed me back to my heavenly father–Dad embodied a level of extreme humility. He was a southern gentleman whose best bud was a literal ass who liked very much to ride around in the back of Dad’s truck as onlookers stared and wondered what was up with that man and his wee donkey. I wish I could find a way to care so little about what this world thinks of me.
As I reflected on all of this, my husband reminded me that Jesus, not long before his death, actually rode into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. What a full circle moment! Yes, his humble birth story really does foreshadow his death story; it points us straight to the cross. “Give us this day our daily bread” we say so very frequently as we pray the way that Jesus did when he was all grown up, the way that Jesus told his disciples to pray. He was and is our daily bread, literally, and this reality was so very plainly spelled out for us through his incarnation, his coming in the flesh for the world to see; and, no, he did not show up down here on a royal’s platter but in a wee donkey’s feed trough–the very picture of humility.
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