Tiny Fingers

The LORD has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all nations [Isaiah 52:10]

These words from Isaiah [see Isaiah 52:7-10, the Old Testament reading for Christmas Day, RCL, Year C] originally fell on weary ears. Decades into exile, the people of Judah had heard it all before—promises of restoration, visions of return, declarations that God would act decisively on their behalf. Yet their once-mighty Jerusalem still lay in ruins, its walls crumbled, its temple destroyed. Some blamed themselves, seeing in their exile the fruits of their own rebellion. Others wondered if God had simply abandoned them. Most had probably stopped listening to prophets altogether.

Yet here was Isaiah, speaking again of divine power about to be revealed. The image would have been familiar to those listeners—God’s “mighty arm,” the same arm that had once delivered their ancestors from Egypt [see Exodus 6:6]. But what good were memories of past deliverance? After years of dashed hopes and unanswered prayers, many must have heard these words with a mixture of longing and skepticism. Was this yet another promise of divine intervention, another vision of God’s power about to be revealed, another call to trust when trust felt foolish?

When people heard of God’s bared arm, they pictured armies routed, enemies scattered, and prison doors flung wide—the kind of dramatic intervention that would vindicate their faith and restore their nation’s glory. They longed for power that would match their pain. They yearned for divine strength proportional to their suffering.

Throughout their history, God’s power had always meant deliverance through strength—plagues that broke Pharaoh’s will, walls of water that crushed armies, fire from heaven that consumed altars. Surely this baring of God’s arm would follow the same pattern. Surely their redemption would come through another display of divine might.

And yet …, history also whispered of another pattern, one their desperate hearts might have forgotten. Before the Egyptian plagues came the burning bush, where divine power appeared in flickering flame that left twigs unconsumed. Before the walls of water, there was a shepherd’s staff transformed. Even great King David began as the overlooked youngest son, watching sheep while his brothers stood tall before Samuel.

God’s power had always surprised them, appearing first in whispers before the whirlwind, in questions before answers, in vulnerability before victory. But who could remember such subtleties after decades of exile? Who could trust in such patterns when redemption seemed to demand something more dramatic, more definitive?

But strange whispers were stirring again in Babylon. Word came of a Persian king who had hinted at their return, of temple walls that might rise again from dust. Could it be that God’s mighty arm was moving in such ordinary channels? Through a pagan ruler’s political decree? Through the slow work of rebuilding, stone by measured stone?

The pattern would reach its fullest expression centuries later, in a backwater town far from seats of power. No armies would march, no walls would fall. Instead, divine strength would be revealed in perfect weakness, the creator of worlds contained in helpless flesh. The mighty arm bared before all nations would turn out to be tiny fingers gripping the edge of a crude manger, reaching toward a world desperately in need of hope.

The whispers would grow into different kinds of rumors—tales of shepherds in fields, of angels singing to the night, of wise men following stars. But these too might have seemed like small things against the weight of Rome’s power, against the daily reality of occupation and oppression—a baby’s cry amid empire’s roar.

Even those who heard the whispers, who saw the child, might have struggled to recognize in him the fulfillment of Isaiah’s vision. Where was the bared arm of God in this scene of common birth? What power could lie in such vulnerability? Yet here, in the most unexpected place, divine strength was being revealed—not in the destruction of enemies but in the embrace of human weakness, not in walls falling but in love entering, not in mighty acts but in mighty surrender.

Those tiny fingers reaching from the manger’s edge would one day touch and heal lepers, break bread for thousands, wash the feet of His betrayer, and be stretched wide upon a cross. They would rewrite every human expectation of how God’s power moves in the world.

The most enduring powers often appear where we least expect them—in moments of quietness, in gestures of gentleness, in acts of vulnerability freely chosen. As morning dawned over Bethlehem, the sky likely seemed ordinary enough. The thunder of Isaiah’s prophecy had settled into the soft sounds of a newborn’s breath, of a mother’s whispered lullaby, of tiny fingers discovering the textures of straw and wood.

The arm of God, bared before all nations, still reaches toward us from unlikely places. The power that shaped worlds still moves in whispers, still appears in vulnerability, still confounds our expectations of how redemption comes.