God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds (Hebrews 1:1-2).
Our last two readings for Christmas Day revolve around one central idea: God the Son becoming a man has fundamentally changed everything. Both John and Paul are writing about this event a few decades after the great chasm between God and mankind was crossed by the Son whose birth signaled the beginning of the end of death. These documents before us are mature theological pronouncements flowing from their own eye-witness encounters with the resurrected God/Man, whose birth we celebrate today, straight through the persecution and suffering they endured to spread the good news of His life and death and resurrection. The words we hear today cost these men their freedom and their lives, but once you have stared into the eyes of the God/Man whose second birth from that other Joseph’s tomb strips death of its power then no amount of pain or privation will stop the inspired tongue and beating heart of the free-born regenerate man.
Paul would have us know how blessed we are to be living in the age prophets and angels longed to see. On the first Christmas Day, victory in the great war between good and evil broke out from the realms of hope and longing. We hear it on the lips of the angels, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men’ (Luke 2:14). After all those years of seeing the black kingdoms of men ripping each apart over nothing, years of seeing human beings made in the image and likeness of the God they love burn themselves to ash through lust and greed. After all of that, the angelic army on duty that night in Bethlehem is so overjoyed they break into a song of victory before some humble shepherds: common men working in a field who don’t even realize yet that the very nature of what it means to be a human has changed forever.
No longer is our race doomed to serve the legion of smiling bastards who hate us; no longer must we grovel and beg before the stupid and the cruel; no, the earth’s true king, ‘the heir of all things’ has come, ‘and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the Prince of Peace’ (Isaiah 9:6). We have a king, a leader, a captain of our salvation who we can follow to the gates of hell and know they cannot stand against us. And that king is not an angel or a spirit or a dog or an alien; no, He is a man born as we were to show us what untapped glory exists within the fleshly frame our heavenly Father gave us to build and create, take dominion and rule.
Jesus Christ has come to restore what was lost in Adam. That first man who failed to protect the world from evil will have his humanity vindicated by the second Adam born not into a luscious garden crafted to meet his every need; no, it is the sinful world Adam and his children of shame and fear covered with the excrement of sin that our Lord enters, not as a man, but as a defenseless child. The power and majesty, strength and courage displayed in this act are the stuff of legend. The Son of God has such utter trust in the goodness and love of His Father that He volunteers to descend into our murky world of lies and betrayal as a child just as He will trust that same Father’s faithfulness and justice when He dies on the Cross and descends into the darkness of death.
Faith and trust then are not just slogans for Christianity, they are not cutesy catchphrases to be splashed across vapid social media pages; no, faith and trust are the miraculous state of men and women prepared for glory: ‘sons of God…which were born, not of blood, nor the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.’ ‘Born of God’, it is not just the birth of Jesus Christ we celebrate today; no, this precious child destined for death leads all of the newborn, remade people of God through the swamps of temptation and the deserts of loneliness and despair. He is there with us because He walked through them before us, and the Son who traveled from heaven to earth to hell to save us will not leave us to fight alone no matter where we find ourselves; that’s what ‘Emmanuel’ means; that’s what ‘God with us’ means.
God walked among us as a man and not even death could rip that humanity away from His divinity, just as our death will not be strong enough to rip away our humanity. The Word by whom all things were made will not allow the pain and misery men have ladled on themselves to be the final word spoken in the histories of this island earth. And so, when we ponder this Christmas the child placed in an animal’s feeding trough destined to be worshipped by emperors and kings, plumbers and electricians, prisoners and priests, remember that if you are a son or daughter of God, adopted into the holy family by grace through faith, then His story is your story. You too are destined to be elevated from the decay and death of this dark world into the glorious light of the world to come. And incredibly, the journey from your mother’s womb through the pain and suffering which besets all men will be known to us in eternity as what it always was: the means by which we grew closer to the God/Man who showed us in His beautiful life of blood and love what it truly means to be human.
Let us then say, ‘Merry Christmas,’ and know why it is truly merry.