Not looking for a baby

In Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent, who has sent her henchmen over hill and dale in obsessive pursuit of a certain princess named Aurora, is disgusted to find that nearly two decades after her search order, the dimwitted minions are still looking in cradles. She turns to the raven on her shoulder and says with steely self-restraint, “Did you hear that, my pet? All these years they’ve been looking for a baby?”

Are you looking for a baby this Christmas? I have mixed feelings about this. After the nativity wars of Warren Mich.; Santa Monica, Calif.; Pawtucket, R.I.; and other places, I am grateful for Plasticine figures of the holy family and of cows and shepherds on straw beds—as long as we are not thinking of Jesus as still a cute little baby.

Newsflash! The baby grew up. Not only was he not cute at the end of his life, but …

“… he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2, ESV).

“As many were astonished at you—his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind …” (Isaiah 52:14, ESV).

Indeed, God cautions about statues and the works of man’s hands, for it is easy to be duped into worshipping them instead of the reality:

“All who fashion idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit. … The ironsmith takes a cutting tool and works it over the coals. He fashions it with hammers and works it with his strong arm. He becomes hungry, and his strength fails; he drinks no water and is faint. The carpenter stretches a line; he marks it out with a pencil. He shapes it with planes and marks it with a compass. He shapes it into the figure of a man, with the beauty of a man, to dwell in a house [A manger?]. He cuts down cedars, or he chooses a cypress tree or an oak. … [H]e makes a god and worships it; he makes an idol and falls down before it. … He prays to it and says, ‘Deliver me, for you are my god’” (Isaiah 44:9–17, ESV).

When I was a child, every year my parents took us to Attleboro, Mass., to a shrine called La Salette. There we climbed the wide stairs on our knees and prayed to baby Jesus and his mother. Or was it too their statues? As a child how could I tell the difference?

Enjoy the nativity scenes but worship the Lord above. Satan would like nothing better than to throw you off the scent of truth with surfeit of religious kitsch.