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There was no room in the inn, but there was room in the stable. The inn is the gathering place of public opinion, the focal point of the world’s moods, the rendezvous of the worldly, the rallying place of the popular and the successful. But the stable is a place for the outcasts, the ignored, the forgotten. The world might have expected the Son of God to be born—if He was to be born at all—in an inn. A stable would be the last place in the world where one would have looked for Him. Divinity is always where one least expects to find it.
Men would no longer be the same once they had heard His name and learned of His life. They would be compelled either to accept Him, or reject Him. About Him there would be no such thing as compromise: only acceptance or rejection, resurrection or death. He would, by His very nature, make men reveal their secret attitudes toward God. His mission would be not to put souls on trial, but to redeem them; and yet, because their souls were sinful, some men would detest His coming.
The nearer Christ comes to a heart, the more it becomes conscious of its guilt; it will then either ask for His mercy and find peace, or else it will turn against Him because it is not yet ready to give up its sinfulness.
An unsuffering Christ Who did not freely pay the debt of human guilt would be reduced to the level of an ethical guide; and a mother who did not share in His sufferings would be unworthy of her great role.
So would He be immersed by the death on the Cross and the burial in the tomb, only to emerge triumphantly in the Resurrection.
It is through temptation and its strain that the depths of character are revealed.
In answer to modern requests for signs and wonders, Our Lord might say, “You repeat Satan’s temptation, whenever you admire the wonders of science, and forget that I am the Author of the Universe and its science. Your scientists are the proofreaders, but not the authors of the Book of Nature; they can see and examine My handiwork, but they cannot create one atom themselves. You would tempt Me to prove Myself omnipotent by meaningless tests; you have even pulled watches on Me and said, ‘I challenge You to strike me dead within five minutes.’ Know you not that I have mercy on fools? You tempt Me
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Two of the greatest converts that Our Blessed Lord ever made, the Syrophoenician woman and this woman, were both made when He was tired. When He seemed most unfit to do His Father’s business, He did it most effectively. St. Paul was taken from work to prison; but he converted some of his jailers and wrote his Epistles. The willing heart always creates its own opportunities.
He did not condemn the earthly streams nor forbid them; He merely said that if she restricted herself to the wells of human happiness, she would never be completely satisfied.
She then did what millions of people have done ever since when religion demands a reformation in their conduct: she changed the subject.
Millions of others have black grace; they feel not God’s Presence, but His absence.
if He was nailed to a Cross, there was a sun to hide its face in shame and an earth to quake in rebellion against what creatures did to its Creator;
One is struck at once by the gigantic aim He proposed for His followers, namely, the moral conquest of the whole world;
There was room for envy when Peter, James, and John were selected on three occasions for intimacy with the Divine Master, but he accepted his humble place; sufficient it was to him to have found the Christ.
This prophecy of Our Lord to Bartholomew shows that the Incarnation of the Son of God would be the basis of communion between man and God.
As men love God, they will also love their country.
All false beatitudes which make happiness depend on self-expression, license, having a good time, or “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die,” He scorns because they bring mental disorders, unhappiness, false hopes, fears, and anxieties.
The wicked fear the good, because the good are a constant reproach to their consciences. The ungodly like religion in the same way that they like lions, either dead or behind bars; they fear religion when it breaks loose and begins to challenge their consciences.
But John was bent on pleasing God, not men;
This prejudice arose from a very false conception of the power and the majesty of God, as if the achievement of His purposes really depended upon the means which the world associates with success.
If John’s greatness had been of the earth, he would have lived in palaces, his garments would have been gaudy, and his opinions would probably have been variable like a reed, blown toward one popular philosophy one day and another the next.
Belief in immortality dies easily in those who live in such a way that they cannot face the prospect of a judgment.
Because he took account of the winds; because he concentrated on natural difficulties; because he trusted not in the power of the Master and failed to keep his eyes on Him.
Excitement is not religion;
He was setting two kinds of bread before them: the bread that could perish, and the bread that could endure unto life everlasting.
Furthermore, no mother ever has to die and take on a more glorious existence in her human nature before she can be the nourishment of her offspring. But Our Lord said that He would have to “give” His life, before He would be the Bread of Life to believers.
Not the dead Christ would believers feed upon, but the Glorified Christ in Heaven Who died, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven.
In His last will and testament, He left that which on dying no other man has ever been able to leave, namely, His Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity, for the life of the world.
Celibacy is recommended as a wiser way, but is not required of the majority.
but there is a third class, those who, not by any physical act, but by an act of willful self-denial and self-abnegation, have set aside the pleasure of the flesh for the joys of the spirit;
Those who choose Christ must choose Him for His own sake, and not for the sake of a reward.
The Roman sergeant, who had his own gods and was hardened both to war and death, came to the answer during the Crucifixion, when both his reason and his conscience affirmed the truth: Truly, this is the Son of God.
