It’s that time of year when every living room is furnished with a decked-out Christmas tree, nativity scenes line neighborhood streets, and the Gospel is sung to classic Christmas tunes on every radio station.
This month, the “holiday season” points us to Jesus Christ’s miraculous incarnation with overwhelming clarity, frequency, and cultural engagement—but are we so accustomed to Christmas that we miss the weight of its significance? Lest we forget, we must examine Christ’s life from His conception. His advent, after all, commenced that day when the Holy Spirit conceived Him in Mary’s womb.
Shortly after Christ’s conception, a fetus became the first man to greet the incarnate Lord when Mary, newly pregnant, visited her cousin, Elizabeth:
In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a town in Judah, and she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord. (Luke 1:39-45)
John the Baptist prepared the way for Jesus Christ even as a six-months-gestation unborn child—with joyful kicks baby John announced to his mother, Elizabeth, that her Messiah was in the room: Jesus Christ, an embryo.
This was as no ordinary greeting—John the Baptist leapt for joy with such strength that his mother could only respond with praises to God for the fulfilment of centuries-old prophecy. That day in Judah, two cousins, one the size of a poppy seed and the other as big as a papaya, rejoiced in each other from their mothers’ wombs.
Our very Savior, the Word made flesh, the Light of life, our Great High Priest, the Author of Creation, the Alpha and Omega, the One in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, saw fit to enter His world as a zygote. It was not beneath Him to submit Himself to the womb, bound by the time and space He Himself spoke into creation.
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever—in the womb and after birth, He was fully God and fully zygote, fully embryo, fully fetus, fully infant, fully child, and fully man. The One Who sits enthroned at the right hand of the Father was conceived a God-man, and with forbearance He grew with Mary for nine months.
The testimony of our Savior’s first witness, both parties unborn, begs the question: How could our nation, as it celebrates the birth of our Savior with songs, gifts, trees, and tradition, not rejoice at life in the womb? I do not remember my time in my mother’s womb—no one does. Perhaps if we did, we would not kill unborn children via the violence of abortion with such pride and disregard. But our Lord, the Creator of wombs who lived in one, certainly remembers.
This Christmas, challenge yourself to be astounded by Christ’s incarnation day after day. Take wonder and delight in His first meeting with His cousin, John, and rejoice that our Savior was born—to live the perfect life we could never live, to take the punishment we deserved on the cross, and to defeat sin and death in His resurrection from the dead. He came that we may have life and life abundantly.
May this story, too, make us adore preborn life with the same joy told by John the Baptist’s leaping, and may we heed John’s call in a nation of 65 million dead from abortion and counting: “Repent, the Kingdom of God is here.”
The Kingdom of God, after all, belongs to the little children.
