By all accounts, it’s a scandal. The son of a king surrounded by animals, in a feeding trough. His royal bed slimed with slobber and moldy bits of hay. Not in a cradle, not with a royal choir. But humble and poor, born with a cry into a lonely night far from home.

He was not welcomed by the best doctor in the land, but by a scared, in-over-their-heads young couple. It makes no sense…how could the king allow it?

For Love.

A God born as a man, walking around with human feet that have toes that can be stubbed. A man who gets colds, and headaches. God looking through human eyes at a human world with all of its smells, and sadness, and less-than-Godness.

For Love.

He came, he put human skin on. He donned a cloak of human experience and all that came with it – rejection, loneliness, sadness, and exhaustion. He grieved, he laughed, he cried, he went through adolescence, he buried his human father and his friends.

For Love.

He closed his eyes on heaven and opened them on earth. As one of us, as God with us. He saw the world from our height, as we see it. He got down low, where we are.

For Love.

But that’s not all. He knew our condition intimately, he groaned with us at this sin-ruined world where we live. He took the hard step to change it all. He sacrificed himself and felt the pain in every very-human nerve in his body, and in every very-God corner of his broken heart.

Oh, the scandal of it all – a king dying for a peasant, God dying as a man.

For Love.