Why did Jesus come as a baby?
Jesus the infant has an enduring power to capture the imagination of the Christian heart. I bet if you close your eyes, you can see the ample round curves of a baroque Baby Jesus, or the strange solemnity of a medieval Baby Jesus. According to scripture, Jesus had to experience a complete mortal life if his divine grace was to have the power to transform all human experience. One inescapable fact of mortality is that we were once all babies. That’s reason enough for Baby Jesus, and that’s reason enough to worship him.
That God would and did subject himself to the vulnerabilities of his own flesh and others’ was a tremendous act of faith as well as love. But I’m not convinced that the theological reasons for Christ’s condescension fully explain our delight in Jesus as a newborn. Why do we revel in his babyness? Why so many cherubic Holy Infants?
