There is so much
celebration that surrounds the birth of our Lord and His visitation. There is
so much music, literature, and art. You name it. Our Savior, the Light of the
world came in to the world of darkness and sin. The Lord of Majesty came down
into a mundane world that had gone wild, mad, and insane.
I love to read J. B.
Phillip’s famous piece called “The Visited Planet.” It imagines a conversation
between a senior angel and a junior angel in which the senior angel tries to
explain why the earth is such an important place in the universe. The junior
angel is frankly bored and comments that the earth seems rather small and dirty
to him. “What’s so special about that one?” “That is the Visited Planet.”
“Visited? You don’t mean visited by …” “Indeed I do. That ball, which I have
no doubt looks to you small and insignificant and not perhaps overclean, has
been visited by our young Prince of Glory.”
The young angel asks a
logical question, “Do you mean that our great and glorious Prince, with all
these wonders and splendors of his Creation, went down in person to this
fifth-rate little ball? Why should he do a thing like
that?”
“It isn’t for us,” said the
senior angel, a little stiffly, “to question his ‘whys,’ except that I must
point out to you that he is not impressed by size and numbers as you seem to be.
But that he really went there I know, and all of us in heaven who know anything
know that. And as to why he became one of them … How else do you suppose he
could visit them?
The little angel’s face
wrinkled in disgust. “Do you mean to tell me that he stooped so low as to
become one of those creeping, crawling creatures on that floating
ball?”
“I do,” replied the senior
angel, “and I don’t think he would like you to call them ‘creeping, crawling
creatures’ in that tone of voice. For, strange as it may seem to us, he loves
them. He went down to visit them, to lift them up to become like
him.”
The story goes on to talk
about how the people of the Visited Planet didn’t recognize the Prince of Glory,
so they killed him. When the junior angel hears this, he blurts out, “The
fools, the crazy fools! They don’t deserve …” He is cut off by the senior
angel who says no one can explain why they were so wicked or why they killed the
Prince of Glory.
There has always been a great divide in the human race between those who have recognized Jesus as the Messiah and those who have not. It is not an even divide either. The majority has never recognized Jesus for who He really is. When He came the first time, Herod hated him, the scribes ignored him, and there was no room for him in the inn. Only the shepherds and the Wise Men, the poor and the foreigners, welcomed him to the earth.
Think about how "the
Grinch" tries to steal Christmas today. He tries to
steal Christmas from our cultural discourse, but, regardless, we will keep on
celebrating the birth of our Lord. We will keep on worshiping. We will keep on
giving and receiving. Nothing has changed. He came
to the world he created, and the world had no idea who he was. The old
spiritual says it this way:
Sweet little Jesus boy,
born long time ago.
Sweet little holy child, we
didn’t know who you was.
Didn’t know you’d come to
save us, Lord, to take our sins away.
Our eyes were blind, we
couldn’t see
We didn’t know who you
was.
In Christ,
Brown
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