The Real Meaning of Christmas
The message I gave in "Carols by Candlelight" at Bethany Evangelical Church on 18th
December 2022
Talking about “the real meaning of Christmas” is a bit of a stereotype.
People
give it lots of meanings, and of course they're free to do so. A shop window near us in Newport seems to have given
up. “Merry Everything” - Celebrate whatever you like and we hope
it’s merry for you! (I don't know whether that's really the message they intended; it's just what I got from it).
In church at a carol
service I think we know about this. The meaning of Christmas isn’t
presents, a big dinner, time off work and TV; it’s Christ coming
into our world. God becoming a human being. Setting the scene for
Easter, when we think of Him saving us from our sins by dying for us.
Many
people know this really, and the Christian meaning is out there in our
culture, even if it usually gets overwhelmed by the other stuff.
Here’s a nice example on top of a pillar box in Carisbrooke.
But has it ever struck you
that God’s method for achieving all this is more than a bit
strange?
To start with, the Christmas
story which we like recounting in readings and carols isn’t all
nice. In parts it’s even “gritty”.
- To
take one example, how was it for Mary travelling from Nazareth to
Bethlehem (about 60 miles) while heavily pregnant? The
Bible doesn’t mention a donkey, but I
hope they did
have
one.
-
How did Joseph feel on that
compulsory journey, seeing what Mary was going through and being
unable to change the situation?
And
then, the central miracle itself is an awkward
one.
-
I remember having become a
Christian in student days, getting some ridicule from friends coming
up to Christmas, who told me that a young girl being pregnant wasn’t
usually a miracle.
-
Being a “fool for Christ”,
as Paul says, is fine, until someone calls me a fool!
So why would God do it this
way?
It’s worth noting that if we
had a made-up religion, it wouldn’t have been like this! God would
have just materialised in human form or “beamed down”. Gods in
pagan religions were always doing that kind of thing.
So
“Why the Nativity?” as a film asks this year?
The
birth of Christ is recounted in great detail from two different
perspectives in two of the four gospels, and
we’ve enjoyed reading extracts in our carol service.
Why does God want us to know all this? He surely does many other
amazing things which we don’t know about.
Someone
once gave me a clue to this by commenting on the nativity scene in
our foyer, “It makes Him look like an ordinary human being”.
That’s
what the Christmas story does! It’s what God intends us to see!
Imagine what our faith would
be like if we didn’t have the gospels of Matthew and Luke with the
parts we’ve been reading today; just Mark starting with John the
Baptist and John diving immediately into theology. Actually, we don’t
have to imagine, we know what happened in the first century before
all the gospels were written down.
A group called the Docetists
claimed that Jesus couldn'y have been a real man. It was inconceivable to them
that God could really be like us, having a physical body capable of
suffering, getting tired, having limitations. Some said that God
descended on Jesus at His baptism and left Him before the
crucifixion. But then, how could He really die for us and be our
saviour? What difference could He make to us?
The early church turned away
from those ideas largely because they had Jesus’ life story
from birth, as well as the things He said and did. They had to accept that Jesus Christ really is God
Incarnate: God living among people as a real human being; fully
human. Therefore, He can be our saviour.
For Christians, that's the
“real meaning of Christmas”: God is one of us. He became one of
us by His own choice, because He loves us. We’re familiar with this
idea, but it’s amazing when you think about it:
Christ
Jesus, being in very nature God ... made himself nothing by taking
the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.
Philippians
2:5-7
He
was born into this world the same way we all are. He knows what our
lives are like. He’s the only one who has demonstrated a perfect
life, without sin, but He died because of sin, so that we don’t
have to.
We
do not have a high priest who is unable to feel sympathy for our
weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just
as we are – yet he did not sin.
Hebrews
4:15
Because
of all this we really can trust Him, depend on being saved by Him and
we’ll be with Him in eternity, because of who He is and what He’s
done for us.
If
we haven’t already put our trust in Christ, Christmas is a great
time to start. If we need to renew that trust, it’s a good time to
do that too.
Having
trusted Christ and received His peace in our hearts, Christmas is
also a good time to spread that peace around, having a good effect on
the lives of others as far as we’re able.
God
chose to be one of us; we can fully trust Him and live for Him.
That’s the “real meaning of Christmas”.