How much infant care has changed, since my wife and I had children! Modern medicine's understanding of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and infant psychology has changed how children are left to sleep. These days children are very carefully packed up in cloth papooses. These papooses are held snugly closed over the infant with Velcro tabs. Low and behold, swaddling is not such a bad idea! Infants like to be snugly wrapped up and it is better for them, while swaddled in such a way, to sleep on their back.

I suspect that it was well-meaning progressives who thought that setting infants free from the encumbrances of swaddling who moved mothers away from the ancient practice, mentioned even at the birth of Jesus 2000 years ago (Lk 2:7). Perhaps they thought that the infant would grow stronger more swiftly, if he was left to squirm about in his crib. How wrong the progressives were. And it took some decades of grief and tears for us to recognize this. One wonders how many other progressive nostrums will eventually cause such agony in our society.

Jesus, born of Mary, was swaddled, with His arms and legs tightly packed into His swaddling clothes for His infant comfort. Yet in the hands so swaddled he held all the universe and its power, the sun, moon, and stars were his playthings. For this child of Mary was none other than God of God. He, who was bound, bound into His service the universe and all that was in it. He, who was newly born, bore the life of His mother Mary in His gracious hands. His tiny feet strode the heavens like the sun running its course with joy. But all this was far too small for this child who is God, for He also condescends to embrace us by swaddling us together with Himself. By taking our nature of Mary He binds Himself to poor sinners like us, raising us from our depraved humanity to a humanity made now new by His incarnation. He is treated by Mary like all children should be treated, as a welcomed gift from a kind and gracious God. He is kept snug and secure, held close to her very heart, the beating of which He sustains for her. O the depth of the mystery of the incarnation. How beyond our fathoming it is.

To what extraordinary lengths God went to rescue us from our fallen and decayed humanity, that His dear Son should bear that humanity, and cleansing it from all fault returns it to us in the sacrament of baptism! In Him, we have been made new because God's Son took our flesh. There is no other way to confess these truths than to be tied to the divine self-revelation in the divinely inspired Scripture. It is not without reason that Cyril of Alexandria continually called the Bible divinely inspired Scripture. No one could come to the full expression of the mystery of the incarnation which attempts to hold all and nothing, God and man, power and weakness, eternality and beginning in one undivided person. None could conceive this without the divine self-revelation. You can't wrap your mind around Immanuel wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger (Lk2:7). But that's what God says, and therefore we believe it and confess it, together with Cyril and all the faithful. God has it all wrapped up.

"Since to say that the nature of the Word was incarnate is nothing other than to hold that it has been made man and not without birth of a woman (for this only way does the nature of human bodies know of), how were you (Nestorius) not taught by the divinely inspired Scripture the birth after the flesh of the Only-begotten? Even you, when the prophetic lessons were before you, 'For to us a child is born, to us a son is given,' (Is 9:6), you say thus of the child that was born, 'Great is the mystery of the gift, for this is the child that is seen, this the new-born that appears, this He who needed bodily swaddling, this the just-born after the divine essence that is seen, in the hidden part He is everlasting Son, Son Creator of all, Son who by the swaddling of His own aid binds the instability of the creation.'  And elsewhere again, 'O Arius, the child is God all-free, so far removed is God the Word from being subject to God.' In which words Nestorius described even the body connected with Him as God. 'We recognize therefore the human nature of the child and His Godhead, and we preserve the oneness of the sonship in the nature of manhood and Godhead.' Look here with all clearness, Nestorius, you say that the child, the just-born, the visible, the new-born, the swaddled, is Son and Creator of all; and the child the holy Virgin has borne to us. You know therefore that God has been born after the flesh, and this you have learned from the divinely inspired Scripture. For who will be conceived to be Creator of all, save He alone through whom the Father made all things (Jn 1:3)?"