So I'm trying to pound this out, and the more I think about it the more agitated/excited I become, and the more agitated/excited I am... the more words I use. I apologize if the following is somewhat convoluted, but here goes.
This is the Christmas season. Sure, we all love peace, love, joy, and harmony in celebration of the coming of Christ. We love family get-togethers that go smoothly and are enjoyable for all concerned. But what pulled Christ from glory and caused him to take on a human nature? What prompted him to come as a baby? I don't mean a cherubic thing in sweet repose on a cleanly bed of straw, like our favourite Nativity scenes. Christ was born (born!). And if it wasn't enough to endure a bloody, nasty process like a human birth, it happened in a dirty stable, and he found himself on the other side living with an unremarkable face and sinful parents, and a world waging war against him with their sin and hatred and temptations and traps. What made the Son of God endure all this, for thirty years, always with his face set toward the cross and separation from his Father? Wasn't it the brokenness - the little hurts and annoyances that cause us to lose our tempers and shake our fists at God and each other? Wasn't it the brokenness - the blackness that fills our souls and causes us to spit in the face of Holiness and Love? Wasn't it the brokenness - the sickness, the ache, the toil, the fruitlessness, not just in ourselves but rife throughout the groaning world around us? Wasn't it the brokenness - all of us, crawling through the ache and toil and strain of life, only to be met with the bitter sting of death at the end?
These are not things we like to experience in the holiday season. Holidays, we are told, are for nice things and safe feelings - materially luxurious presents and comfortable feelings and warm beds and tasty food and familial bliss. But this holiday, we celebrate God Incarnate coming to earth as a Man. Think about it. He forsook perfect, glorious bliss - communion with the Father and Spirit, all the praise and glory of heaven (wonder and joy and perfection beyond the best holiday I can ever remember or imagine!). That Eternal, Almighty God should do that much is enough to stagger the mind, so get this. He did it all for the sake of sinful, wretched, crawling, spitting, shouting, hating, whoring, depraved humanity. These included his own people, who would take him and shake him and surround him with filth and hatred and deceit, till, finding they could not bend him into sinfulness and rebellion against God, they put him to death.
This Christmas, I hurt. I hurt for myself, for my own frailty and sinfulness, for things done badly and things not done well. I ache for the hurts of those I love, the consequences of sickness and betrayal and personal sin. But I pray this holiday season is not just a spiritual narcotic - a strong dose of Fun'n'Stuff to dull and distract me from the pain and suffering within and around me. This is one holiday, at least, where it should be both fitting and profitable to embrace our strugglings and the bitterness of this life, and remember that the King of Glory came to endure all that and more for our behalf. By God's strength, I will take hold of that thread of pain instead, and follow it straight to the arms of Jesus. He came to suffer and conquer; praise God, he suffered and conquered. The King of Glory left heaven for me, and he is there now, having put all things in heaven and earth under his feet. To know this is to weep, and to wonder; to mourn my own sinfulness and defeat, and yet to rejoice in Christ's holiness and victory.
No, I don't think Happy Holidays even begins to cover it.
