Greetings to you all! I hope you’re having a wonderful Christmas day and that the Lord’s teachings this Christmas season have been illuminated afresh for you.
It helps me to take a few minutes during the Christmas season to regain my focus. I don’t enjoy candy because when you’re done eating it, you’ve gained nothing but empty calories and a slick, sugary taste in your mouth that taints everything else you eat with that overpowering artifice. Sometimes I feel the same way about Christmas: yes, there’s a point to it, but it gets lost behind a fat old man that somehow just won’t die, a saccharine parody of the real man Nicholas of third-century Turkey who has been apotheosized for all the secularists who want an excuse to stimulate themselves and the economy but don’t want to have to bother with the real reason for the season. Are you as exhausted as I am with all the hustle and bustle? At least here in America, the real vacation comes after the so-called holiday.
But all hope for the real meaning is not lost! What is it that we really celebrate on Christmas?
In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to his own town to register.
So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”
You’ve probably seen the picture here many times: everyone has to go out to these specific towns based on his lineage and birthplace to be counted and taxed as part of the Roman empire under Caesar Augustus. Joseph takes his betrothed (which was as good as married for the Hebrews in those days), a woman named Mary, with him out there. They arrive in Bethlehem and there’s no room for them to board for the night—understandable, because Bethlehem was a small town and would have been inundated with people coming for the census. The innkeeper tells them they can have the stable out back, and that’s where Mary has the baby.
Now, the foremost miracle here is, of course, the “virgin birth”—Mary hadn’t consummated the marriage vows to her fiancée, Joseph, and hadn’t slept with anyone else, either: the Holy Spirit actually came upon her and impregnated her with this child. Many people disregard this as insignificant, but do you know why a virgin birth is necessary? It wasn’t because God was feeling spontaneously ostentatious: the curse from the Garden of Eden fell on Adam’s head and on his descendants. Everyone that is born, save Jesus Himself, is Adam’s child in this sense, inheriting the fallen nature. (This is not to say that all chaste young ladies are sinless or don’t also have this sin nature; that’s not true. But again, the sin nature is transferred through Adam.)
Now, what about this “no room” business at the inn? If they had been elite members of Herod’s entourage, replete with chains and rings of gold and faces painted to the nines, you can bet they would have gotten a room. But God had in mind for Jesus a humble birth to parents of humble means. Think about it. Can you imagine the pain Mary must have gone through in this dirty, un-heated stable? (Granted, she probably wouldn’t have thought of it as particularly cold or nasty, having not grown to this age in pristine, sanitary conditions available to us today, but nevertheless, surely this was a terribly uncomfortable position to be in.) Though Jesus is fully God and fully man, THE miracle in the flesh, there’s no indication that the childbirth was somehow miraculously painless for Mary. She endured labor amidst the animals, and then laid the child in a feeding trough for the cattle after she’d wrapped Him in strips of cloth (referred to in some English translations as “swaddling clothes”). Frankly, there’s another miracle in and of itself: sans midwife, fresh linens, or comfort, neither Mary nor Jesus died of infection from this process!
Here we find an interesting note about how God uses His chosen people. Mary is said to be “highly favored” of God (so says Gabriel, the angel of annunciation, in the first chapter of Luke). Notice what Mary must endure: not only the pain of this birth, but as Simeon prophesied over the infant later, “And a sword will pierce your own soul too,” referring to the anguish of the cross for both Christ and His mother. To be favored of the Lord does not mean to live a cush life in luxury and happiness all of your days (insert “tra la la” here). No, it is to be sharpened like a sword, which causes heat, friction, and the shaving off of the unnecessary parts of yourself to become a man or woman of God, progressively more and more like Jesus.
Three notes on the appearance of the angel to the shepherds. First, to whom did God announce the Christ? Not to kings, with fanfare and pomp; but to the lowly, the humble ones. Another note here is that the shepherds were terrified and had to be reassured by the angel. You never find a cute, cuddly little angel, babies, women, or even soft men. These are spirit beings that are too wonderful to behold without trembling and fear. For this reason, angelic apparitions people claim to have had seem to be lacking something fundamental as far as extrapsychological manifestation: the terror that must be quenched when a mortal beholds the immortal. And finally, a note on the word “Christ.” This is a Greek transliteration for the word “Anointed,” just as “Messiah” is a Hebrew transliteration meaning the same thing. Jesus was the Anointed of God by the Holy Spirit, the Savior of the World. Christ is not a last name: it is a title.
Here’s another thought. Angels are never reported in the Scriptures as actually singing. Not once. They are reported to “say,” or to “proclaim.” Humans are the ones to whom is given the gift of song. The angelic hosts may well have songs too magnificent to imagine in our mortal bodies, but those never reach our ears. We are the ones that celebrate Christmas by putting to song the words of the angels, especially these which in the Latin are the first line of the hymn “Gloria in Excelsis Deo.”
The Point
But the most important thing about the birth of Jesus is what it anticipates. He came to Earth to save us from our sins by dying a vicious, undeserved death and taking upon Himself all the sins we have committed. Who are those “on whom [God’s] favor rests”? The believers in this atoning sacrifice, the ones who trust in Jesus’ name, which from the Hebrew means “the LORD [Yahweh] will save,” and in the essence of His life and death, and resurrection. That’s the real joy of Christmas: without the first coming of the Savior, we would die apart from the love and peace of knowing our Creator God, who loved us enough to send His son to Earth to be born in humble conditions and lead a lowly life until a wretched death, after which He would be exalted.
Merry Christmas to you: may you know the peace and joy of Christ!
