Celebrating Christmas

by Maurice Pujol
Published December 7, 2006

No matter what the courts say, no matter how we’re greeted at stores during this season, we can still celebrate Christmas. For believers, this isn’t just another holiday. It’s the commemoration of a momentous, world-changing event.

Jesus Christ is the very manifestation of God in our midst, but not as something “other.” God touched this world as one of us, just as He had promised for centuries. Believers have always had difficulty expressing this mystery of the faith, and many attempts to define the identity and nature of Jesus have ended in false explanations that reduced the Incarnation to something explainable, something the feeble human mind can grasp.

Jesus is fully human. He was born the way every other human is born. He developed in the womb of His mother for approximately 39 weeks and entered this world just the way everybody else does.

Jesus is also fully divine. The Bible tells us His human nature was given the breath of life by the power of the Holy Spirit, the same ever-creating Spirit that hovered over the waters at the beginning of creation. Jesus-as-man was conceived as no other man has been, the virgin birth being one of the cornerstone doctrines of the Christian faith. As God, the Bible also tells us that Jesus really had no beginning, that He has always existed. He left His high estate in heaven to accomplish something very special on behalf of the human race.

Jesus is the expression of God’s will to bring us back to the status for which we humans were originally designed.

Believers express their understanding of Jesus’ identity in various ways. Jesus is the Son of God. Jesus is the Word made flesh, the same Word by which God created everything in the first place. Jesus is the Lamb of God, the perfect sacrifice for mankind’s sins.

Based on Jesus’ own words, we believe in one God, manifested in three different forms of Personhood. Jesus referred to the Father and the Holy Spirit, yet still applied the divine name “I AM” to Himself. This is another great mystery of our faith, and human attempts to reduce it down to something “logical” have led men down some very narrow paths, ending in doctrines inconsistent with biblical revelation.

Jesus is who He is, and this doesn’t change, no matter how men may try to explain it all. Probably the best way to approach an understanding, however imperfect, is to use analogy, similar to the ones C.S. Lewis proposed in his writings.

We humans could think of ourselves and the world as a vast warehouse full of statues, and there’s a rumor going around that the sculptor who made us has sent someone who’s going to transform us into something else. In fact, the sculptor has come himself, but in a form that looks just like us.

Like us, but different.

The rumor is that he has arrived to show us how we can become like him, in form and in appearance at least. But here the plot thickens. There’s more to the story.

A few are passing along the really unusual story that the original models from which we were designed used to be like that, but they tried to run away from the sculptor. After that, the rest of us were made as we are – dead, hard, lifeless stones.

One of the sculptor’s spokesmen, also one of us, passed along the word that he wants to transform us into living stones. Living stones? What’s that?

There’s a lot of excitement among the statues about discovering the answer to this question. Wouldn’t it be great to move on our own power, to speak and to love? The word is that the sculptor’s emissary will make it possible for this to happen.

There are many among the statues who are against this sort of change. In fact, they resist any change whatsoever, citing as foolish any notion that we can become anything other than we are.

Even among those who believe the sculptor is going to change us, there is wide disagreement over how he will do this. The debate among the believers often gets bogged down in peripheral issues, the “good” statues arguing over questions, which aren’t essential to the faith.

But then comes Christmas. All the believers celebrate at this time of year, and all agree on its meaning. However and whenever the sculptor is going to change things, one thing is certain. A change is going to come.

During this season, believers celebrate life. They celebrate the new life represented by the coming of a very special Child who brings new life to all who believe. For a while at least, we don’t have to think of Jesus as the Suffering Servant, the Lamb of God led to the slaughter for our sins. We can save that for the Easter season.

For now, we can focus on the joy Jesus brings, the joy of new life, the joy of eternal life. We can revel in the peace Jesus makes possible, the peace that passes all understanding, the peace that comes from knowing we are joint heirs with Him of the glory that will one day be ours.

Viewed 377 times