Christmas means God cares intimately about the details of our human struggle.
A friend of ours is returning home to Asia after nearly a decade here with her family. Reflecting back on things that shaped her understanding, she said, “The first time I went to a church they said to welcome your neighbor. I wanted to know what a neighbor is. I found out God wants you to love everyone, not just the people you know.
“When our daughter got hurt and we were at the clinic, I was crying because she got hurt. An old woman hugged me and said, ‘You’re a good mother.’ I felt she was an angel.”
Her husband marveled that people here cared so much for a foreign couple.
As we focus on the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, believers in the west seem impressed by the deity of the newborn. Messengers from Heaven reveal the baby’s identity to field hands who have to be told not to be afraid, because this is good news. The Savior, the Lord himself, has arrived! Glory in the highest! Our songs are filled with angels and glorias.
But often our international friends, new to the Bible, are more impressed by the earthiness of the story. This happened in a historical setting, in a place people visit to this day. God cares about shepherds and young mothers far from home, and that suggests that he cares about everyone everywhere. And sometimes, when you least expect it, God brings perfect strangers to help you in an alien culture, to give you a hug and a kind word in a clinic, maybe to show that he is not so far away as you had imagined.
When we think of Christmas as a religious holiday, we tend to see the story as otherworldly and irrelevant to the heaviness we bear daily. But the writers of the Gospels immerse us in real-life heaviness:
—an aging couple feels shame at having no children;
—a young woman celebrates that this news means the overthrow of tyrants and God’s justice for the downtrodden poor;
—people on the Lord’s mission have to run for their lives;
—a people with a long history of failure and suffering are still the community God chooses to inhabit.
—the Savior himself will walk the path of rejection, suffering and death.
Christmas isn’t about trite escapism. It’s about how intimately our Creator shares our griefs and bears our failures. It’s about the realization that our helplessness is the very place where we meet him.
(Copyright 2021 by David K Shelley, jackofalltribes.org, and International Students, Inc. All rights reserved)