“And she wrapped the babe in swaddling clothes…”

More often than not, that particular detail of the birth narrative of Jesus made little impression on me. Yet, in that small matter of providing protective covering for this newborn, it dawned on me, just what a beautiful and significant act it was.

We live in a time of incredible availability of clothes. Most of our clothes are fashioned by designers and sold in marketplaces around the world, and manufactured in mass-production facilities providing duplicates of what we wear in hundreds of cities across the globe. From swaddling clothes, we have come a long way, baby!

Mary’s act of caring in wrapping her newborn in swaddling clothes was undoubtedly a task long anticipated. Knowing of her child’s approaching birth, for certain, preparations had been made for appropriate garments for her little one.

But in first century Bethlehem or Nazareth, there would not have been boutiques and malls to supply such needs. Instead, the preparations would be noted in much more humble forms. In certain days in our own nation’s history, a mother might have stitched together a simple garment from the flour sacks that she might have preserved and washed and fashioned carefully to meet the need of the day. For Mary, those swaddling clothes would no doubt have been humble garments, but perhaps the long worn, many times washed garments of her own that now would be soft and comforting, much more so than stiffer cloth of recent weaving.

Today’s acid washed, stone-washed, bleached and “worn” manufactured efforts would not have matched the soft and carefully prepared strips of cloth she selected for her precious newborn.

Mary gave to her child the makings of warmth and comfort and protection…the remnants of other garments, perhaps, but nonetheless, the best for this time and place.
I had in my closet a shirt, over worn, almost in tatters, but a shirt that when I put it on felt like the finest silk. It was delightful to wear, on any day, it felt good. Its long sleeves kept off a chill; its size was right, its extra thinned condition the evidence of much satisfaction in the wearing of it. I would not have parted with it, except as I sent my son off to college last year, I remembered he sometimes liked to wear some of my old shirts that I had “outgrown”… I handed him my favorite on a hanger.

That shirt has no doubt passed its prime and it is time for another, but when I think of Mary and the swaddling clothes…I think I understand exactly what she felt in her giving. And it made me think even more about how God felt about the giving of his own son…to us all.