"Unto us a son is given." Isa. 9:6; Every year the Christian community rejoices in the fulfillment of this prophecy and seeks to understand more fully the deep significance of the occurrence that heralded Christ's coming to the world for humanity's redemption.
It is an annual wonder that Christendom celebrates so faithfully the birth in Bethlehem of a boy named Jesus to a young woman called Mary. No doubt babies were being born daily in Judea. What makes this birth unique? It represented at that time the long-awaited appearing to human consciousness of the Messiah, or Christ. More than the entrance into the world of a corporeal child, it was the utterance in human thought of the incorporeal idea of God's fatherhood. It was the event destined to transform consciousness, dissolve materialistic belief, and establish the understanding of man's being as the outcome of the one God, Spirit, not of physical reproductive processes.
In this decade, then, Christmas must surely have a special interest to us all. While the world debates the mind-boggling implications and prospects of modern genetic engineering, it is reassuring — and helpful to human progress — to ponder the true, spiritual facts of man's origin as revealed by the man who was born nearly two thousand years ago of the Virgin-mother.
