Incarnation

by Paul Harvey

The angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy..." (Luke 2:10, NIV)

You know the Christmas story, the story of God born as a man in a manger and all that, escapes some moderns. Mostly I think because they seek complex answers to their questions and this one is so utterly simple.

So, for the cynic, and the skeptic, and the unconvinced, I submit a modern parable.

The man to whom I'm going to introduce you was not a scrooge. He was a kind, decent, mostly good man, generous to his family, upright with his dealings with other men, but he just didn't believe all that incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmas time.

It just didn't make sense and he was too honest to pretend otherwise.

He just couldn't swallow the Jesus story about God coming to earth as a man. He told his wife, "I'm truly sorry to distress you, but I'm not going to church with you this Christmas Eve." He said he'd feel like a hypocrite, that he'd much rather stay at home, but that he would wait up for them. And so, he stayed home and they went to the midnight service.

Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began to fall. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and heavier, and then went back to his fireside chair, and began to read his newspaper.

Minutes later he was startled by a thudding sound, then another, and then another, sort of a thump or a thud.

At first he thought someone must be throwing snowballs against his living room window. But when he went to the front door to investigate, he found a flock of birds, huddled miserably in the snow.

They'd been caught in the storm, and in a desperate search for shelter had tried to fly through his large landscape window.

Well, he couldn't let the poor creatures lie there and freeze, so he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony. That would provide a warm shelter if he could direct the birds to it.

Hurriedly, he put on a coat and galoshes, tramped through the deepening snow to the barn. He opened the door wide and turned on a light.

But the birds did not come in.

He figured food would entice them in, so he hurried back to the house, fetched bread crumbs, sprinkled them on the snow, making a trail to the yellow lighted wide-open doorway of the stable.

But, to his dismay, the birds ignored the breadcrumbs and continued to flop around helplessly in the snow.

He tried catching them; he tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them, waving his arms. Instead, they scattered in every direction except into the warm, lighted barn.

And then he realized that they were afraid of him. He resigned himself, "To them, I am a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could think of some way to let them know that they can trust me, that I'm not trying to hurt them, to help them. But how?"

Because any move that he made tended to frighten them, confuse them. They just would not be led or shooed, because they feared him.

"If only I could be a bird," he thought to himself, "And mingle with them, and speak their language. Then I could tell them not to be afraid. Then I could show them the way to the safe, warm barn."

"But I would have to be one of them so they could see, and hear and understand."

At that moment the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sounds of the wind, and he stood there listening to the bells, listening to the bells heralding the glad tidings of Our Savior's birth, and he sank to his knees in the snow.