I have just taken a late Christmas eve break to put the final touches on our annual end of the year letter. A break from what you ask? A break from a Christmas eve ritual that resonates with just about every parent in America. A trial of faith that unites me with men across the globe and in generations past. A trial that is known by just three little words that resonate in the soul:
Some assembly required.
As I look at the foreboding pile of wood and bolts and washers and doo-hickeys and funny shaped little things that must somehow be melded together coherently before morning, I was drawn to think about a recurring theme that we have reflected on this advent season. We’ve been amazed at just how sanitized and squeaky clean and nice the Christmas story has become, and just how shallow our glances at it can be. The Christmas story can be a lot like the instruction sheet that I’ve been looking at for the past few minutes. Not many words, a few cute pictures, a lot of things left out, and a few puzzling things that I’m not quite sure are English.
The Christmas reality is far from the niceness of plastic nativity, lowing cattle, and grinning angels. The Christmas reality is more about a dank and smelly stable in a backwater bit of Israel during the reign of a deadly king who had a thirst for the blood of all who would oppose him. In God’s sovereignty, the Light of the World–the very son of God–the one from whose very utterances sprang the whole of creation–entered into this world at this time. In this place. To earthly parents who were bearing the brunt of a neurotic Roman emperor’s tax scheme, and who were so utterly rejected by their own family that the only place they could find in their ancestral home to give birth was a cave used to stable livestock.
Jesus entered into a dark world and encountered dark times. His first trip was a hasty departure for Egypt as an infant to escape the wrath of a jealous pseudo-king who sent a slaughter squad to murder Him, by way of the murder of hundreds of innocent toddlers. His father’s providential hand brought strange men with gifts, one of which provided the financial means for the flight to Egypt, and another a gift fit for only a burial and forshadowing the death that He would face in due time. The world was dark indeed, and Jesus was indeed the light.
The hope of this season is not sentimental feelings or seasons greetings, but that these events that occurred so long ago are an arrow that point straight to the single most important, most horrible, and most hope giving event of all time. Jesus entered in to this dark, sinful world to deal the deathblow to sin and to pay a price that only Emmanuel, God with us, could pay. Jesus entered this sinful world to be our sin bearer. He came to take upon himself the due penalty for sin–both yours and mine. That penalty is death. And on the cross at Calvary, that penalty was paid.
We have been given much grace this Christmas season to consider the gravity of these events. The result in my own heart has been a much greater understanding of the depth of my own sin and just what price my Savior paid for it. We want our family traditions around this season to be an arrow pointing to the cross, and not mere sentiment. We want our kids to grow up and think of these years with warmth and fondness, but we want that warmth and fondness to have weight to it that will anchor their souls. And we want that anchor dangling from heaven.
May you all have a wonderful Christmas, and may your fondness for the season be weighty indeed.
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