If 24-hour news networks existed in 1809, they would have been falling over themselves chasing the latest news from the Austrian countryside. There they would witness first hand mighty Napoleon’s army moving across the nation with the fury of the recent California wildfires. No doubt on-the-scene, up-to-date reports would have worn out the viewer with the latest village sacked by Napoleon’s might.
What would have been missed in the haste for the next big scoop were events that would have a much greater impact on world history than one stage of Napoleonic conquest. That year cradles rocked newborn babies who would shape the future, including:
–William Gladstone, future Prime Minister of the UK
–Poet Edgar Allan Poe
–Alfred Lord Tennyson, later Poet Laureate of England
–And on the same day, February 12, a British physician and his wife welcomed a baby boy named Charles–Darwin, while a Midwestern US couple swaddled their little Abraham—Abraham Lincoln.
I would suppose were you to ask a history major to name the major military campaigns of Napoleon in 1809, he would struggle. But most people would easily recognize the list above.
Go back about 18 centuries earlier. Rome had emerged as the dominant world power. No nation could stand against its might. From the Atlantic eastward to the Euphrates, from the Sahara to the Danube, the Roman Empire personified the word dynasty. Palestine existed as one tiny state under the heavy boot of Rome. Augustus, the cynical Caesar who demanded a census to determine a measurement to enlarge taxes, was declared a god following his death. Who could have noticed a couple making an eighty-mile trip south from Nazareth? What difference could a carpenter and a teenaged girl make compared to Caesar’s decisions in Rome? Who cared about this Jewish baby born in Bethlehem?
God cared. Unwittingly, mighty Augustus became nothing more than an errand boy for the fulfillment of the words of the prophet Micah. He was a puppet in the hand of God, a piece of fuzz on the pages of prophecy. While Rome was busy making history, the One whose life split time—by whose birth we date our calendars—arrived. The world didn’t notice. History had seen Alexander the Great, Herod the Great, and the great Augustus, but the world missed it when the One who flung the stars into the heavens was born. History missed the coming of its Author. But now, we know, he is the one John called “the Lamb slain from the foundations of the world.”
Ironically, in that year of 1809, Washington Irving created a tale of a chubby fellow named Saint Nicholas. The little elf known as Saint Nick rode his magic horse across New York City. Small enough to fit down chimneys, he left gifts for the good children and switches for the naughty ones. While versions of his story have continued to our time, maybe we can dig a little deeper and go back a little further to reflect on something even more timeless. Perhaps this Christmas season we can reflect on the humility of the Christ Child, on the wonder of His nativity, and the wonder of birth—particularly the New Birth. I for one will try to reflect on the wonder of the Incarnation this Christmas, and think that perhaps, in God’s Providence, there are little babies around us who may do far more for the Kingdom of God than we may see.
This was inspired by a story I first read in Charles R. Swindoll, Growing Strong in the Seasons of Life (Portland: Multnomah Press, 1984), 87–8.
