Christmas is the most unusual birthday the world celebrates for many reasons.  One reason that became more apparent to me as I studied the Bible this year is Christmas’ connection to the image of Christ as the Lamb of God.  My discoveries of this image followed something of a journey, as you’ll see below.  The journey of discovery began with the gifts, then the visitors, then the lambs, then the manger, and finally the children of Bethlehem.

The Gifts: As Nancy Guthrie explains in Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room and as one of my favorite modern carols highlights, the gifts of the magi were unusual and full of meaning.  The fact that there were three gifts is the first signal that these gifts were symbolic because the number three in the Bible is a sign of perfection and completeness.

Gold was a gift for a king, a recognition of Christ’s royalty and his status as the promised king of David’s line.  Frankincense was burned as incense, offered with the temple grain offering, and used in the perfume reserved for temple use.  This gift also reflects imagery that would come later in Revelation, where the prayers of the saints arise as incense before the LORD (Revelation 5:8).  Frankincense points to Jesus’ sacrificial mission as well, where he would be offered as a sacrifice to God the Father.  The third gift, myrrh, directs us to Jesus’ coming death because myrrh was used on dead bodies during embalming.

The connection of frankincense to the grain offering is interesting as it seems to be a connection to Jesus’ being the bread of life who provides for his people’s spiritual needs.  If this seems like a stretch, remember that “Bethlehem” means “house of bread” and that his first bed was a manger, a feeding trough which was meant to be filled with grain.

The baby born in Bethlehem was the promised king, the bread of life, the answer to the prayers of God’s people, a sweet sacrifice, and destined for death before he was even born.  The gifts the magi brought remind us of these truths.

We find these gifts so strange and impractical, yet full of meaning.  When we talk about what “better,” more practical gifts we would have chosen to give, are we not perhaps like Judas and others of Jesus’ disciples who exclaimed over the impractical, wasteful actions of Mary when she anointed Jesus before his death? The generous, seemingly crazy, expensive gifts Jesus received as a baby and as a man headed to the cross all pointed to the extravagant, costly gift he was giving to his people: his perfect life and atoning death for unworthy sinners.

The Visitors: As a baby and then during his ministry, Jesus drew both the high and the lowly to himself: Jews, Gentiles, and even the angels. The prophecies and promises came to Israel, but they were also for the whole world, and the wise men from the east remind us of this truth.  Jesus came first to the Jews.  This is seen symbolically in the group of shepherds who come to celebrate his arrival the night he is born.  Then about two years later, a band of Gentiles also come to him.  These staggered meetings appear to be in some ways a foretaste of the missionary model Jesus provides in the Great Commission, when he sends the apostles to the Jews first and then to the rest of the world.  Another perhaps more obvious reason the two groups of visitors are significant, though, is that they represent Christ’s roles as the Good Shepherd and as the king.  All Christ’s visitors, including the third group (the angels), bear witness to him, acting as prophets, heralds of his birth, and pointing to his role as prophet too.

I’ve always been a bit baffled by the delay of the wise men’s arrival.  Obviously, since the star appeared when Christ was born, and they lived far away, the journey delayed their arrival.  But with all the other forewarnings the angels were busy handing out to Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary, and Joseph, God clearly could have orchestrated for the wise men to be at Christ’s birth.  That would have been so much grander, right?  But that wasn’t the point; Christ’s birth was supposed to be humble, and like I mentioned above, he came first to the Jews.

Another possible reason for the delay is that God also intended for it to be an encouragement to Mary and Joseph and others who knew that the baby Jesus was the Messiah, people who would have to wait thirty years after the first Christmas before Jesus would begin his ministry and his miracles. That’s a long time, especially for people.  Moses’ being away for forty days on the mountain talking to the LORD, who had descended in fire on Sinai before Israel was all the time it took for God’s people to forget everything they had just heard and seen and to go make an idol to worship instead of the God they had sworn to worship and obey.  Imagine what Israel would have done if Moses had been absent for three decades, with no miracles or signs from God that he was God’s leader or that God was present with them.

The lambs, the manger, and the children of Bethlehem: Why were shepherds and sheep Christ’s first birthday guests?  Why was he born in a stable and placed in a manger?  And, biggest question of all for those who know the last bit of the two-year nativity story, why did the children die?  I think the answer to all of these questions is related.  They all point to Jesus as the Lamb, once again a backward look to the Old Testament and a forward look to Revelation.

The shepherds of Bethlehem were unique because they tended the sheep intended for the Passover each year.  The caretakers of the Passover sacrifices come for the arrival of the ultimate Passover lamb.  The day is coming when their lambs will no longer be required because the perfect, once for all sacrifice will have been made. In the Christmas story, God is letting them know that day is almost at hand.

Looking at Christ’s death this way may seem demeaning—another reminder of his humiliation by descending to earth and becoming human—, but with the stable, manger, strips of cloth, and hovering shepherds, the scene looks more like a lambing than the birth of a child, much less a king, the king and Messiah.

The sacrificial Passover imagery concludes with the grievous scene that closes the curtains on Jesus’ natal story: Herod’s slaying of the male children in Bethlehem. This story points back to another evil ruler who sought to wipe out an Israelite threat to his power with male infanticide.  But as with Pharaoh in Exodus, from whom God miraculously delivered Moses, Jesus is whisked away from Herod and harbored in Egypt.  Jesus is passed over for now, not to be slain like the Passover lambs at a year old, but to go to the cross willingly after living a righteous life for his sheep.

Herod’s evil act reminds us how strongly the world and we, except by grace, reject God’s greatest gift and that this gift delivery was not easy, but difficult and costly, pointing to the sacrifice to come.  This ending to the story of Christmas also reminds us that God does not forget or abandon his people.  He provides everything we need, beyond what we could ask or think.  When Jesus’ parents may have most needed encouragement, God sent them visitors from another country to demonstrate Jesus’ divine role once again.  God also used these foreign visitors to spread word to the king, priests, and people of Jerusalem that their Messiah had arrived.  God gave Jesus and his family gifts full of meaning that may also have been necessary to finance their sudden flight to Egypt.  And he spared his Son, for a time, that he might complete his mission.

And what mission was that?  Listen to the voice of Christ’s herald, crying in the wilderness.  When John the Baptist first sees Christ and announces him to the world, he does not say, “You are the Christ,” as Peter does later in the Gospels.  John’s public introduction of Jesus is instead, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).  This announcement is so important that John repeats it the next day, once again announcing, “Behold, the Lamb of God!” (John 1:36).  This is the lamb of whom Isaiah spoke:

“He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief… Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.  But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.  All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.  He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.”

Isaiah 53:3–7

The Christmas Lamb: My pondering on the points above left me thinking: why a lamb?  Why not a fierce lion or a strong ram, both of which appear as images of Christ in the Old Testament?  Why is Jesus’ most common animal image, and the one that’s the focus at his birth, that of a young, weak, not-so-bright animal?  There is obviously the Passover in mind here and general sacrificial imagery, but perhaps Jesus as the Lamb is another reminder that he wasn’t coming as the earthly conquering king Israel expected, but as the sacrifice they needed (Isaiah 53; Philippians 2:5-11).  He was the long-expected yet unexpected human, baby, poor, carpenter, friend-of-sinners, walking-on-water, storm-calming, table-throwing, parable-speaking, crowd-feeding, demon-casting, yoke-bearing, weeping, foot-washing Lamb who was born, lived, and died to take away the sins of the world.

But just as the slaying of the children of Bethlehem wasn’t the end of the Christmas story, so Christ’s death on the cross isn’t the end of the story for us, for he rose again and is in glory that we might know his sacrifice was complete and that he is interceding for us, has sent his Spirit to be with us, and shall return again in glory and judgment as the worthy Lamb who was slain and as the king who will reign forever.

“For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.'”

1 Corinthians 1:26-31

---

Works Cited

The Holy Bible, English Standard Version.  Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Bibles, 2001.  Print.