Christmas & whatnot
It’s been a while since I last blogged - I’m surprised to see how long! I’ve had a busy month at work and at Grace Church and I haven’t been great at making the spare moments needed to write my thoughts here.
Rest assured - because I know you were panicking - there will be more on the Reformation in the New Year. If that won’t cheer you up, nothing will.
So then, it’s Christmas. It is therefore obligatory to write about Christmas. It’s probably also obligatory to write about how people are missing the point of the festival, which is convenient as that’s true.
It’s beginning to sound like a cliche in Evangelical circles to say that the meaning of Christmas is Easter. The intention here being, of course, to suggest that Jesus birth always pointed towards his death and resurrection and therefore towards the life-giving offer of freedom in the gospel.
That’s true. It’s also not all of the truth. While it is very helpful to read Jesus life in light of his death as the eventual conclusive end of his mission, it isn’t all of the story. We run the risk of saying that Jesus’ life is only important in the way it points towards his inevitable death and glorious resurrection. This isn’t entirely wrong, it’s dangerous to forget that Jesus was always looking forwards towards that future time.
So, Christmas is about Easter. But it isn’t only about Easter.
The length and depth of the meaning and import of Jesus’ life would take hundreds of blog posts to encapsulate. My offering is simply this:
This Christmas in our struggle to remember the scandal of the babe born to die, let us not forget the scandal of God born.
The idea that God died on a cross is ridiculous. This isn’t hard to see. We often miss that the idea of God born as a man is just as bonkers.
The almighty, all-perfect, ever-present Lord of hosts - infinite, eternal and glorious - was born, which in itself is an impossible statement, as a man, the complete opposite of what he was, at that a finite, weak, limited man in a body doomed to death and ignominy.
Why did he do that? Bizarrely because he loved us and wanted to show us his glory.
Remember that this Christmas.
Explore posts in the same categories: Theology, Reflections