(The Nationalist, December 2001)
‘God became a person that people might become God’, wrote one of the early saints of the Christian church.
Christmas is God’s way of saying that he wants to get involved with humanity as fully as possible, that is, by himself becoming a human being. God is not standing far off, across the sea or over the mountains, but within us. The kingdom of God is among us. God is in our relationships.
God’s coming among us was a gift, a testament to divine regard for the human person, sinful, stupid messers though we are. It is God saying that precisely because we don’t deserve his presence, we need it. God does not keep us at arm’s length because of our frequent betrayals and compromises. We may smell badly but God draws close.
Christmas is about God coming to humanity not in power or with an agenda of control, but in weakness – who is weaker than a new-born child? – and in service. ‘I have come among you as one who serves’, Jesus said. God could, so to speak, have thrown his weight around and sorted us all out by the exercise of his power. But to do so would have taken away our freedom, and with it our capacity to love. God is a lover, not a rapist.
Christmas says that God is not a problem to be solved, or an argument to be won, but a presence to be revered. It means that the Christian faith is not an ideology, or a moral prod, or a system of social control. It is about a person, one who was like us in all things except sin, but who, for our sake, became sin so that in him we might become the sinlessness of God.
Christmas means God entering our life so that we can enter God’s. It means that all of us are in the hands of God, who is within us more fully than the air that we breathe and part of us more than the blood in our veins, and without whom we could not exist in any way even for the shortest moment.
Thank God for Christmas, for the reminder that there is more to life than a short span – sometimes one of suffering – but that God has not given up on the human race and is always with his people.
A prayer for Christmas:
‘Deliver us, Lord, from every evil,
and grant us peace in our day.
In your mercy keep us free from sin
and protect us from all anxiety
as we wait in joyful hope
for the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ.’