For 2000 years it had been preparing, ever since God had called Abraham and his family to worship him and to leave Mesopotamia and settle in what we now know as the Holy Land.  During the succeeding years that inconspicuous family became a great nation from which, when the fullness of time was come, God called the Maid of Nazareth to be the Mother of his Divine Son.

His birth had been foretold by God’s spokesmen, the prophets, and he was awaited not only in the Holy Land but throughout the Middle East and among the Jewish communities of the Roman Empire.  People knew that he would come, but they did not know the manner of his coming.  And when Jesus was born at last, the world was not ready.