It's a rare moment to sit and reflect in the middle of holiday preparations.
When did Christmas start to mean making so many plans you meet yourself coming and going? We've got parties and presents, gatherings and goodies, cards and church. Preparation consumes days, evenings, lists, budgets.
Historically, Christmas was a mass, maybe with stockings stuffed with oranges and chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil. People didn't plan holiday schedules months in advance. Sometimes, there weren't any gifts at all. Did they not know that Christmas is about the joy of giving and family togetherness? I guess Hallmark hadn't gotten that message to them yet.
Of course, if you want a party, you could go back to that first Christmas: the actual evening Jesus was born. There weren't shiny baby announcements printed by an online printer; but there were angels announcing his birth. There wasn't a baby shower; but there were those really rich guys who came months late with a fortune - not an exaggeration - in gifts.
Something big happened. Something to trigger heaven's hosts to sing. Something that would cause people - even people who don't actually profess faith - millennia later to pause their usual lives and acknowledge a peculiarity in the day.
It wasn't family togetherness. Joseph and Mary don't seem to have been welcome with their families back in Nazareth.
It wasn't the joy of giving. Those smelly shepherds who showed up that night probably didn't leave anything behind them other than a pungent odor.
It was Emmanuel. "God with us."
What's the big deal about that?
Do you realize that every other religion on the face of the earth is an attempt by man to reach god(s)? Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam . . . even some that borrow language from Christianity and encourage their people to read the Bible, they're all a story of men striving to make themselves right. People trying to approach God through working, praying, fasting, denying themselves, traveling to holy places. They know something stands between man and God, and they do everything humanly possible to get past that or to outweigh it with "good" things so God will approve of them.
Christmas is a big deal because that is when God gave us the gift we never saw coming: He came to us.
Emmanuel.
God with us.
No more striving. No more analyzing whether we've done more good than bad. No more comparing and wondering and worrying. God reached down, became a man, so he could die. So he could rise. So he could obliterate death and sin.
Not so the good works would outweigh the bad, but so that the bad would die - poof - gone.
Not so we could get to God, but so that God could live in us.
Not so we could do good things, but so that God could act through us.
Not so we could have a good life, but so that we could live eternally.
If that's not a Christmas miracle, I don't know what is.
The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.
John 1:9-13 ESV
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