How do you feel about Christmas?
Some people love it and have never reallylost the wonderful child-like innocence of it all – they can't wait for the decorations to go up, the music to start playing and the anticipation of the big day itself, spent with loved ones.
For others, it's one of the toughest times of the year. Cold weather, memories of past Christmases where everything went very wrong, broken relationships and loneliness all take their toll. And Christmas is the hardest time to be alone.
And for those of us who go to church, Christmas is often the time when we hear sermon after sermon reminding us not to take Christ out of Christmas, or all we'll be left with is M&S. It's clever, but I don't think it goes far enough.
So amid the abandoned diets, merry-making and sorrow, preparations and presents and pies, let me offer three quick thoughts about Christmas.
1. Let Christmas blow your mind
Of course, Christmas is about Jesus being born in Bethlehem over 2000 years ago. And it's a great story to teach children – there are all kinds of useful lessons about it being important to treat refugees and poor people well. But so often we leave the Christmas story for the children, and we don't stop to realise how earth-shatteringly huge it is. It's like buying a new car, and only ever using it to enjoy the way the windscreen wipers work!
Christmas is when the infinite, eternal God, who made everything that exists became part of his own creation. And not an important part either. He didn't become King of the Universe at Christmas, though even that would have been a big step down. He became an illegitimate baby born to a poor couple from a conquered race, born in a grotty cave-stable in an insignificant backwater of a town in the unfashionable end of the Roman Empire. And that is the same God who spoke and the universe was created. A Christmas carol puts it well:
Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain; Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign. In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.
Or as C.S. Lewis wrote in The Last Battle: “In our world, too, a stable once held something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.” If that doesn't blow your mind, I don't know what will.
2. Let Christmas bring you to your knees
And God did this not just to blow our minds, but to enter into our experience. The God of the Universe became one of us and lived as one of us so that we could know him and be with him. God himself bridged the gap between people and God, and at immense cost to himself.
Do we praise and worship God for Christmas? Do we let the facts of Christmas bring us to our knees? I recommend that you take some time on your own or with another Christian to just think about what God did at Christmas until you are left with no choice but to worship him for it.
3. Let Christmas warm your heart
Christmas is also a time to celebrate what we have in this life. Telling people to put Jesus at the centre of Christmas often doesn't work because they don't see how he will help them enjoy Christmas more. We need to show them that Jesus was right when he said “I have come that they may have life to the full,” and that the best life to live is one with Jesus at the centre.
So I hope and pray you will all enjoy Christmas, that you will enjoy Christmas all the more because Jesus is at the centre of it, and that you will share that enjoyment with others who don't have as much to rejoice about.
God bless, and have a very Happy Christmas!
4 comments:
Here's the problem. Every serious commentator on the infancy narratives has concluded that the events described never happened. Even for christians - especially for educated christians - christmas is a problem.
That's only true if you define "serious commentator" as "one who concludes that the events never happened", at which point your comment seems somewhat superfluous.
If further evidence were needed, I could cite "serious commentators" who argue the birth narratives are historical. For example, Prof. Markus Bockmuehl, NT and Early Christianity scholar at Keble College, Oxford, says they are "historically legitimate and defensible".
Or maybe you want someone who has written a physical commentary? Darrell Bock, author of a very highly-regarded fairly new three-volume commentary on Luke-Acts, writes this:
The issue of historicity in these accounts is a judgement that reflects the worldview of the interpreter...
Many interpreters do speak of a core of historicity in these accounts, but they tend to demur at different points. Nonetheless, one's judgement about historicity, especially in view of the presence of angels and a miraculous birth, depends more on how one sees God's activity in the world than on the data of the text... there can be no doubt that the text's perspective sees the events as historical realities and calls the reader to see them in the same way.
Mmm, seems you miss the subtlety here. Saying that they are "historically legitimate and defensible" falls a long way short of saying it is even probable that they happened.
Bock's comments are even more nuanced. 'There can be no doubt' usually means, is in this case, 'there is huge doubt', otherwise why say it? And, claiming that the texts want to be regarded as describing historical events (which is debatable) does not mean that they actually do describe historical events.
I stick to my first point, every SERIOUS commentator.....' The ones you quote, though serious enough also fall a long way short of claiming historicity for the narratives. Read them carefully again and work it out.
No - it works fine. I just didn't claim what you thought I claimed. I wasn't citing references to say that it happened (but I can).
You claimed "Every serious commentator on the infancy narratives has concluded that the events described never happened."
I found two serious commentators who didn't conclude that, but concluded that it was quite possible to believe that the events described in the infancy narratives did happen without suspending ones rational faculties.
As for serious commentators who say that it happened, here's Bock again. For context, he's discussing whether the virgin birth actually happened, or whether it was a pious legend invented by the church, possibly in response to perceived OT prophecy or in response to Greek culture.
There is no need for the church to have created the event. To exalt Jesus' birth falsely would have been of no benefit to the message about Jesus. In fact, the absence of this emphasis in the kerygma shows that the concept was not emphasised in the church's preaching. Such a claim would only bring derision, unless something generated it (see the exegesis of 1:31). Why place another stumbling block in the message? Ancients were not as gullible as many suggest. A concrete event must have generated this belief about Jesus, even if its significance emerged slowly.
That's in Luke, vol 1, p104-5 if you want to check it.
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