The point of Christmas…
Dec 24th, 2009 by ljkim
It’s easy to get so busy with things and lose the point of it… Like a bride or groom who’s so busy planning the wedding that he forgets to love and appreciate his future spouse… Or a collector of books who’s so into collecting books that he no longer enjoys reading them… Or an evangelist who is so involved in evangelism, that he has no time to delight in God. There are millions of ways we get busy enough doing something to forget the point of it. The early Christians actually didn’t celebrate Jesus’ birth because they thought doing so would miss the point… How so?
They believed that Jesus was the “Word become flesh”, the idea and character and essence of YHWH God distilled into a real live human being. Every word He said, every thing he did, on camera (so to speak) and off… was the exact human representation of who God is. And so as far as the believers were concerned, Jesus wasn’t born, He was older than the universe…or as Jesus said, “before Abraham was, I am…”
But the birth narratives of Jesus (in Matthew and Luke) have a straight forward point… And even though celebrating Christ-mass wasn’t entirely a Christian idea, Roman Christians embraced what was good and tried to find the real message… God did not come in might or wealth or power or strength – but in frailty as a real human baby. Why? Because he did not come to judge or even to heal or teach (although he did those things, those weren’t the main things) – but Jesus came to be a living sacrifice… To live a perfect life of love and compassion, and to die for sins in our place. This meant he needed to do the whole thing, to live a whole life. God wasn’t here to make a cameo appearance, but to play the main part.
Or put it another way: after centuries of teaching Israel how to make a right sacrifice, around 4BC, God finally revealed why… So that they would understand what it meant for God to come and offer himself as a sacrifice. Behold the Lamb of God! Come to take away the sins of the world!
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