Wade Johnston, Life Under the Cross: A Biography of the Reformer Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis: MO, 2025.
This ancient “tale of two mothers” concerns far more than theological semantics—it is the difference between a God who sends and a God who comes.
This story points us from our unlikely heroes to the even more unlikely, and joyous, good news that Jesus’ birth for us was just as unlikely and unexpected.

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Even now we sing as we live in His gifts, and await His second Advent—His second-coming.
God graciously bursts our foolish plots by coming our way, into our very flesh, and being God with us.
Jesus loves His church. He cleans her up. He takes her as His own. And He leads her.
If this opening verse offers to us both door and doorkeeper, then the doorkeeper stands with the door held securely shut.
Every age gives cause for both hopefulness and despair.
Those clinging to God in Christ can be assured that it’s all clean.
Beware the lament, dear readers, that is not soothed with the good-goods of Jesus.
The creation is one of God’s good gifts and being cut off from nature and wild places, as we often are in the modern world, is probably not so good for us.
I’m still laughing now as hard as I laughed back then. And the salve that he gave me in that moment still works some strange magic on me to this day.