Christmas With G.K. Chesterton: A 5-Day Advent DevotionalSample

The exciting quality of Christmas rests on an ancient and admitted paradox. It rests upon the paradox that the power and center of the whole universe may be found in some seemingly small matter, that the stars in their courses may move like a moving wheel around the neglected outhouse of an inn.

G.K. Chesterton, The Daily News (1901)

Of Paradoxes, Celestial Ladders, and Moving Wheels

G. K. Chesterton was called “the prince of paradox” for good reason. With the skill of a diamond miner, he unearthed paradoxes at every turn. He mused on contradictions, inconsistencies, and incongruities. He reveled in irony, disparity, and absurdity. He spoke of a God “as narrow as the universe.” Of a cross comprised of paradoxical angles, opening its “arms to the four winds.” Of Christmas resting “on an ancient and admitted paradox”—that the greatest gift the world has ever received arrived in obscurity in a backwater town in ancient Palestine on a night when the streets were filled with drunken laughter and the inns were full. No one was in the mood for miracles. Only those actively looking for Christ’s arrival might find Him, and then only if they squeezed past the crowds, zigzagged through back alleys, and out into the cool dark to a place where cattle noises threatened to muffle the sounds of a baby’s cries.

Chesterton wisely recognized the profound irony of the incarnation, marveling that “the power and center of the whole universe may be found in some seemingly small matter”—that God Himself would choose to enter human history in the most anticlimactic fashion imaginable (perhaps God, for all His grandeur, has a sense of humor after all). As Chesterton says elsewhere, “Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.”

Time and again throughout Scripture, God baffles, perplexes, and bewilders us. He who inhabits eternity dwells with the humble and contrite of heart (Isa. 57:15). The celestial conductor of wind, earthquake, and fire makes His presence known in a gentle whisper (1 Kings 19:12–13). The King of Kings arrives not in a castle but in “the neglected outhouse of an inn.” God Himself is a glorious paradox. As Chesterton eloquently articulates in his poem Gloria in Profundis:

Outrushing the fall of man is the height of the fall of God.

There is a concept known in some cultures as an axis mundi, defined by Merriam-Webster’s For those with the eyes to see, the cave in that forgotten corner of Bethlehem was (at least for a time) an axis mundi, “the stars in their courses” turning “like a moving wheel” around the humble birthplace of Christ, who is Himself the physical embodiment of the intersection of heaven and earth. When Nathanael declared that Jesus was, in fact, the Son of God, Jesus replied, “You will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man” (John 1:51). Jacob’s ladder was a prophetic picture of Christ, “the meditator of the new covenant” (Heb. 9:15). Ephesians 1 tells us that the whole purpose of God’s plan of redemption is to “unite all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth. ”Dictionary as a “line or stem through the earth’s center connecting its surface to the underworld and the heavens and around which the universe revolves.” In other words, it is a “thin place” of unusually high spiritual energy where heaven meets earth. Genesis 28 recounts the story of Jacob’s dream, in which he saw “a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven. And behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it!” (Gen. 28:12).

As Chesterton says in The Everlasting Man, “No other story, no pagan legend or philosophical anecdote or historical event, does, in fact, affect any of us with that peculiar and even poignant impression produced on us by the word Bethlehem. No other birth of a god or childhood of a sage seems to us to be Christmas or anything like Christmas. It is either too cold or too frivolous, or too formal and classical, or too simple and savage, or too occult and complicated. Not one of us, whatever his opinions, would ever go to such a scene with the sense that he was going home.”

There was no room in the inn for Mary and Joseph when the universe itself could not house the child Mary carried in her womb. For a brief time, the humble cave was the resting place of He who is the eternal resting place of every humble heart. He who was born that night is he through whom all things were born. In the moving conclusion of Chesterton’s poem The House of Christmas, he writes:

To an open house in the evening

Home shall men come,

To an older place than Eden

And a taller town than Rome.

To the end of the way of the wandering star,

To the things that cannot be and that are,

To the place where God was homeless

And all men are at home.

Let us join that holy pilgrimage and follow the star to the humble, paradoxical place where hope is born, heaven and earth meet, and we are eternally at home.

Reflect:

1. Why does God choose to side with the contrite and the lowly? How does this connect to Jesus’ pronouncement that the pure in heart will “see God” (Matt. 5:8)?
2. Consider how this passage in Isaiah anticipates Christ’s coming.
3. Consider how you might adopt a posture of humility and contriteness during this season.