It’s Christmas again. Panic time! What on earth am I going to get the family? Will we even be able to get together with all these transport strikes happening? And with inflation at a record high, will we be able to afford it anyway? Apparently, over 20% of families will take out an overdraft or otherwise find credit to pay for Christmas. And half of these will be borrowing money to cover the cost of Christmas food itself, not just all the presents and other stuff that Christmas entails. Help…But however you approach it, I really do hope you enjoy your Christmas, manage to avoid the onslaught of commercialism or the pressure to follow other people’s agendas, and appreciate deeply what this fantastic feast is all about.
Because it really is something worth celebrating. The Bible is full of celebrations and it seems that God joins in the fun when we focus on the good things he has given us and celebrate together with others.
Israel, for example, was told to keep back a tenth of all they produced. But this wasn’t some religious tax – it was used to help the poor, widows, orphans and foreigners in the land; and to supply the needs of the priests and Levites who had no land of their own.
But every third year the Israelites were instructed to take their money to Jerusalem, and when there, to buy choice food, and wine or beer, and celebrate joyfully before God. Families and friends, unashamedly spending time together, creating an environment of joyful celebration over good food and drink. Sounds like a plan! You don’t need to take out a mortgage to have a decent celebration, but it’s also not free. Strengthening relationships and building memories comes at a price, but one that apparently God thinks is worth paying.
Celebrating also needs a focus – maybe that’s why we like birthdays and other such occasions. Otherwise, it just becomes plain hedonism, having a good time for the sake of it. A celebration needs a reason, something that we can genuinely rejoice over. And at Christmas, Christ certainly is “the reason for the season”, as the saying goes. So best not to let the fun and games obscure what it’s all about, but make time and space alongside all that to appreciate again just how Christmas started.
To do that, we have to go beyond our nativity-play induced picture of innkeepers and stables, shepherds and angels, kings on camels, and in the middle of it all, one beatific baby. Somehow the mince pies and mulled wine, carols sung by angelic choir boys and cheery TV presenters succeed in changing the way we relate to what actually happened in Bethlehem. This was no carefully staged reality show or Hollywood blockbuster. It was real.
Jesus’s entry into the world was like that of any other baby – torn from the warmth and comfort of his mother’s womb, emerging through blood and pain into a potentially hostile and dangerous world, especially in first-century Palestine. Somehow, in that moment, God’s purposes for all of creation came to be contained in that minute ball of newborn humanity.
Despite the carol’s best intentions, the little Lord Jesus no doubt did his fair share of crying those first few days. Mary too. We have no reason to believe that Jesus was at all different to any other milk-guzzling nappy-filling (if they’d had nappies back then…), spend-half-the-night-screaming, but still somehow delightful human.
God chose to come to us in the weakness and fragility of an ordinary human life. No gimmicks or tricks, no back-doors or get-out clauses. Jesus’s body hurt when he fell over, fought germs and bacteria like ours, felt hunger and thirst as we do, not to mention the complex mix of hormone-fuelled emotions that flood our senses throughout our lives. Here he was, God, now one of us, nothing more and nothing less.
I don’t think we can ever really take in what that means. None of us has ever experienced the glory of eternity from God’s perspective, a world without suffering or sin or pain or death, a realm of utter peace, joy, goodness and pure, uninhibited love. That was Jesus’s home territory. He’d never known anything else – not personally at least. Yes, he’d no doubt suffered as he watched his creation tear itself apart, experiencing pain at the choices that humanity, made in his very own image, seemed destined to make. But that was vicarious pain, the pain of an external observer; now he stepped into that world for himself.
For the next thirty years, the one born in Bethlehem found ample opportunity to experience all that life in our world implied. (And even saying this, we may fail to appreciate what that meant for the eternal, without-beginning-or-end God to experience being limited by time.) The gospels only give us occasional glimpses, precious snippets of Jesus’s incarnate life: obedience, suffering, learning, growing, finding his place, discovering his identity and fulfilling his destiny.
And just like all other human beings, his life could only go in one direction. Jesus was to leave this world the same way he came into it – with cries, blood and pain, accompanied there too by the mother who gave him birth. His life ended as that of any human, ebbing away, seeping through the cracks of our mortality. His death was to give us life, but that did not make it any easier for the living one who chose to die.
And it all began at Christmas.
So revel in God’s goodness to you. Relish the love that brought Jesus into our world, the infinite, unconditional, intimate love that excludes no one. Celebrate the fulfilment of God’s promises and eternal plan. For you, for me, for all. Live the wonder of Christmas.
Photos by Gareth Harper, Michael Payne, Patricia Prudente, Phil Hearing & charlesdeluvio on Unsplash
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