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Bethlehem – The House of Bread
Micah 5; Luke 2:1-4; Matthew 2:1-5
I wanted to take this season of Advent to further dwell on the devotionals around the Advent wreath and
tell the rest of the story behind them.
With these three scriptures from Micah, Luke and Matthew we can have a
fuller picture and appreciation of how intimately God works to have His will unfold out of His great love for us
all.
There are a number of tantalizing features in this drama over the course of 700 hundred years from the time
of Micah to Jesus.
One of them is that it took over 700 years to unfold and yet the situation in Israel wasn’t all
that different; that is, they were still at war, or being occupied or oppressed by foreign rulers, and yet God had a
plan for their salvation, in spite of themselves and errant ways and betrayal of His ways.
Micah’s concern was the injustice he witnessed, or learned of, in the twin kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
This injustice stemmed from the corruption of the leaders in both capital cities, which set the tone of widespread
corruption elsewhere in the two nations.
Israel and Judah were weakened by their division; the sons of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the twelve tribes of Israel, were at odds with each other.
They were politically and
spiritually corrupt and vulnerable to foreign occupation and the ideas and gods that came with them.
So Micah
confers judgment but also hope and deliverance.
With the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem another fascination occurs.
Herod the Great had a summer palace
called the Herodium.
He was the Herod who had John the Baptist beheaded and called for the male children to
be slain in hopes of killing this prophetic child born in Bethlehem.
Guess how far Herodium was from
Bethlehem?
A little over four miles.
Herodium was on the tallest hill outside Jerusalem; situated to catch the
summer breeze off the sea and situated overlooking little Bethlehem nestled down in the valley.
You have to
catch the irony of it all.
Here’s Herod within sight of, walking distance from - Bethlehem, right where Jesus
was born.
One king looking down upon the King of kings.
Jesus’ father Joseph may well have worked as a
mason and carpenter at the Herodium.
What juxtaposition, what a concurrence of fate that is.
What a crazy
God we have to set this up, it’s almost laughable, and yet what power and intention and message God intends
with these two kings being in spitting distance of each other.
We also have to appreciate the infamy of Herod the Great.
He was a ruthless man who died a miserable
death.
Recently, doctors have agreed that Herod the Great succumbed at age 69, with chronic kidney disease
complicated by a very uncomfortable case of maggot-infested gangrene of the… well, let’s say, his private
areas.
Jesus, on the other hand, would also suffer a miserable death, only to become the Savior of the world.
These two kings could not have been further removed from each other in their impact on the world.
All that
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Herod built, and he was magnificent in his building projects, is rubble and ruin.
All that Jesus built, in the
hearts of believers, will be nothing less than everlasting life in heaven, whose streets are paved with gold.
And
while we wait for that day, we may live in abundance of the heart and soul in this day.
Speaking of heaven and earth, the ancients often believed that heaven and earth were separated by but a
few feet, or that heaven was just “behind the veil.”
That phrase comes from the veil that separated the Holy of
Holies, the most sacred place in the Temple where the priest would enter once a year to perform the ritual for
the atonement of the people, from The Holy Place, where other rituals were performed on a more regular basis
(Exodus 26:33), screening from view the Ark of the Covenant, the cherubim and the chariot throne.
The veil
which screened the Holy of Holies was seen as the boundary between earth and heaven.
It was this veil that
was to be torn upon Jesus’ death, meaning that God had come out of the Temple and into the world of
humankind to enter the hearts of believers as God’s new temple of the Holy Spirit.
Christmas can be
understood as a thin veil between heaven and earth.
The famous 20th century Trappist monk Thomas Merton once wrote that thin places are ever more
prevalent than we believe, but we just don't see them.
He wrote, "Life is simple.
We are living in a world that
is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time ... if we abandon ourselves to God and forget
ourselves, we see it sometimes ... the only thing is, that we don't (let ourselves) see it."
We miss those glimpses
of the kingdom of God, breaking in on the earth, which is ironic given the fact that Jesus taught us to pray that
we might see the kingdom come "on earth as it is in heaven."
Perhaps one of the most significant thin spaces between heaven and earth that we miss on a regular
basis is the celebration of Christmas.
In the midst of all the preparations for Christmas, we might get too caught
up in thinking that this is just another Christmas season with the same traditions and myriad obligations (most
of them self-imposed) that require all of our attention.
We can miss the fact that Christmas really calls us to
consider the thinnest place between heaven and earth the world has ever seen -- not a temple veil, but a
manger; and not a feeling, but a Person in whom heaven and earth both fully dwell.
Christmas is a thin place.
Bethlehem is a thin place.
The prophet Micah called the people of Judah to focus hard on finding a thin place, a glimmer of hope,
in the midst of the thick and foreboding threat of foreign invasion.
Like a raging storm, the Assyrian invaders
were bearing down on them to sweep them away as God's instrument of judgment against His people.
They
would dodge that particular fate at the hands of Assyria, but they would not escape the later Babylonian
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invasion.
Like so many of us, the people of Judah made the mistake of thinking that God was far away, so they
built thick walls of defense to protect themselves, holding God at a distance.
God would break through,
however, and their walls, both literally and figuratively, would eventually come tumbling down.
And yet, even in the midst of all this impending doom, God offers a word of hope through the prophet
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