God was in the Manger

Recently we read these quotes (below) from "God is in the Manger", a compilation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Advent Christmas writings. But thanks be to God! Jesus Christ did not stay in the manger. He has been from the manger to the cross, and has risen victorious to the right hand of the Father, and the knowledge of His Lordship will fill the earth far as the curse is found, and His unshakable Kingdom shall have no end. Christmas is a promise fulfilled, and we can be sure that all His other exceedingly great promises will be faithfully kept as well.

While we live in between the Already and the Not Yet, pain is real. But we find comfort that His pain was real too. In all our trials, He was born to be our Friend. Behold our King in a lowly manger! In His name all things will be set right one day, the path to misery will be closed for good, and tears will be wiped away. In our lives, we will be troubled, but fear not, for He has overcome the world. So we can sing, even in a minor key, "Rejoice."


This letter from an imprisoned Bonhoeffer to his fiancee is achingly beautiful, and something to ponder often during Advent and beyond.

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"Be brave, my dearest Maria, even if this letter is your only token of my love this Christmas-tide. We shall both experience a few dark hours -- why should we disguise that from each other? We shall ponder the incomprehensibility of our lot and be assailed by the question of why, over and above the darkness already enshrouding humanity. We are being subjected to the bitter anguish of a separation whose purpose we fail to understand. And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives."

-ak