Christmas has arrived, our celebration of the Nativity of the Lord. But this Christmas is disrupted, by illness, by fear, by divisions between people which seem irreconcilable. And yet this is the season of “peace and goodwill to all”. Really?
Maybe we ourselves are fortunate to be able to celebrate with family and friends, but we know many are not. Do we celebrate with a guilty feeling that maybe somehow we shouldn’t? Do we celebrate with a feeling of defiance, against a virus, against opponents of whatever type?
This ambiguity, even contradiction, in Christmas is not something new in our time. It was there at the very beginning. Jesus was born into a society full of sickness that had no cure, a society that was torn apart by religious and political conflict, that would shortly be obliterated by insurrection.
And yet angels came with tidings of great joy, shepherds got to be the first to see God become human. The Word became flesh.
The nativity didn’t change the world. Most of the world didn’t notice. And even of those that did notice, some didn’t care, and some actively worked against it. Was this really what God had in mind? Couldn’t He have managed something just a little more impressive than a few shepherds and three rather odd strangers to mark the biggest event in human history?
God didn’t come to change the world. Despite the rhetoric of the prophets, at least in the way it was often interpreted, and the later confusion of Jesus’ disciples, His idea was never to remake the world in that way. He was after something much more profound. He wanted to change us. He expects us to change the world. That is our job, in whatever little part we play in it.
But for now, for today, for Christmas Day, we can relax from all of that. We can listen to angels and prophets, we can hang out with stinky shepherds, we can visit with disregarded people, and know that God is indeed in our world, in our lives. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us.