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That very first Christmas has a little bit of detective work built into it. It’s not a “who did it?” as much as it is a treasure hunt. The treasure is, obviously, Jesus. He is not playing hard-to-get, but the shepherds still have to unravel the clues the Angel of the Lord gave them if they are to find the Messiah. At this point, they don’t know that their lives and the life of the world will be forever changed. Here are the two clues, the two signs, given to them then and given to us now: You will find a child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. This is what we have to go on if we are to seek and find the Christ in our own lives. 

The first clue: swaddling clothes. Swaddling clothes are more than just soft, warm clothes you would wrap a newborn in. To be wrapped in swaddling clothes means you are the beloved. You were wanted, treasured and appreciated by those anticipating your birth. And when you were born, you were wrapped in love and affection. To be wrapped in swaddling clothes means you came into the world under ideal conditions and sustained by those same idyllic conditions. We might call it bliss or a little piece of heaven. That’s the way it should be for every child who comes into this world, but often it is not. The ideal, unfortunately, is rarely the reality. This leads me to the second clue: You will find him lying in a manger. Here comes the reality, and it is far from the idyllic. While there is nothing unusual about a baby being wrapped in swaddling clothes, there is something unusual, even wrong about the Messiah of the world being born in a barn and laid in a manger, a food trough for the animals. 

The angels are telling the shepherds, and by extension us, that one of the clues—the swaddling clothes—is normal, commonplace, exactly what you would expect to find. But the other clue—a baby in a food trough—is strange, bizarre, unusual and even wacky. 

The swaddling clothes represent the ideal world. The baby in a manger represents anything and everything in your life, my life, and the life of the world that is far from the ideal. 

Picture if you will two columns, side by side. The first column we’ll call it the Kingdom of Heaven. We could also call this the Swaddling Clothes column. Picture, next to it, a second column. We’ll call this one the Kingdom of God. We could also call this the Manger. So, you have Kingdom of Heaven/Swaddling Clothes on one side, and you have Kingdom of God/Manger on the other side. 

A word about the difference between the Kingdom of Heaven versus the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of Heaven, as the name suggests, makes us think of heaven, the idyllic world. Perhaps the Garden of Eden, before it got mess up with snakes, apples, fig leaves and bad decision-making, was in fact heaven on earth. In the Kingdom of Heaven, everything is as God intended it to be, everything is just and right, harmonious, joyful, restful, peaceful, worry-free and beautiful. It’s like a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes. 

The Kingdom of God, on the other hand, is our world as it is. It is, as the name suggests, God’s Kingdom. However, unlike the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of God—which Jesus tells us over and over is within us—is an unfinished project. The Kingdom of God is this world where both justice and lots of injustice live, where there is both love and lovelessness, where there is both peace and war. It is like a baby lying in a manger, a food trough. It is what it is, but it is far from the ideal. 

Picture the two columns again, the column of the Kingdom of Heaven/Swaddling Clothes and next to it the Kingdom of God/Manger. 

In the Kingdom of Heaven/Swaddling Clothes column every child conceived and born is considered a “gift” loved beyond all measure. These children are surrounded by their parents’ sacrificial love, a love that will do anything to provide for this child. In the Kingdom of God/Manger column are the children born into poverty, the children born in refugee camps, the children born to parents with substance addictions, the children born to parents who are ill-prepared for parenting. Many children have no bed, barely a manger, and have learned to see themselves not as a “gift” but as a “mistake” or as a “burden.”

In the Kingdom of Heaven/Swaddling Clothes column is where couples and families live in harmony and delight in every occasion where they can be in each other’s presence. In the Kingdom of God/Manger column every family has it’s struggles. Relationships are fractured, people aren’t talking to each other, hurts take forever to heal (if they ever are), and they have never known what it means to be one, big, happy family.

In the Kingdom of Heaven/Swaddling clothes column everyone works, has meaningful work, earns a just salary, and feels good about providing for themselves or their family. In the Kingdom of God/Manger column people struggle to find a decent paying job, don’t know how they’ll pay for rent or food, feel stuck in a job going nowhere, and live with the frustration of always belonging to the “have-nots”. 

In the Kingdom of Heaven/Swaddling clothes column the Church, itself, is the perfect reflection of Christ. The members of the Church from top to bottom, exude charity, sacrificial love, forgiveness, inclusiveness, are slow to judge and are always quick to forgive. In that idyllic world, when the world sees either the institutional Church or any of its members, you and me, they see Christ himself at work in the world. In the Kingdom of God/Manger column, we as Church, are a mixture of good and bad, of sin and grace. We both love and abuse our own members. We are all broken and all of us love in an incomplete way where our hidden agendas and our individual egos make us less than models of God’s perfect love. 

The lists between the contrasting columns The Kingdom of Heaven/Swaddling Clothes and The Kingdom of God/Manger are long. They are like two railway tracks that never intersect or two ships that pass in the night unaware of each other. 

Yet the birth of Jesus says that this doesn’t have to be the case. Whenever we pray the Our Father, we pray “may your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” In other words, “may your Kingdom in Heaven come to your Kingdom on earth and transform it into the one, eternal Kingdom. You see, both the idyllic Kingdom of Heaven and the imperfect Kingdom of God here on earth are both God’s kingdoms. God is as much present in your life, my life, the life of the world (the Kingdom of God), here on earth as God is present in the Kingdom of Heaven. After all, the baby born to us this day is Emmanuel, God-with-us. The baby in swaddling clothes and the baby places in a dirty food trough are the same baby, the same Lord. Our job, as Christians, is to enable the Kingdom of Heaven to push into the Kingdom of God and so transform it into the Kingdom of Heaven. In other words, our job is to bring heaven to earth as Jesus himself did. Jesus loves the whole package from the dirty, smelly barns and mangers right up to the swaddling clothes and everything and everyone in between. The clues, the signs, the angels give us lead us to such a love. And the treasure we find in this Jesus is a love more than we could ever have imagined on our own.

Fr. Phil Mulligan