The comfort of Christmas
The comfort of Christmas
Familiar sounds, sights, and smells make Christmas comfortable. Yet the reason for our celebration—the birth of God’s Son—is a mystery beyond our comfortable thinking.
Music from the radio fills the room. Everybody knows the tunes; they hum along and, here and there, sing just a few words softly. There’s a nativity scene in its usual spot, and as the soprano commands, “SLEEP in HEA-venly pea-EACE,” your eyes settle on the little porcelain manger, whose occupant appears to be doing exactly that.
The chef is in the kitchen, working on a menu she knows by heart, supervising a staff of relatives that can’t be entirely trusted to get every lump out of the potatoes. Soon your family will pull up their chairs, place their napkins on their laps, and smile at one another over a mountain range of “comfort food.”
Christmas is a time for the traditional, the predictable, the familiar. More than any other holiday, Christmas is comfortable.
Until it occurs to you who it is in that manger. Then, Christmas becomes downright unnerving.
God comes to earth
Who is it? Isaiah says that the child born for us is none other than the “Mighty God, Everlasting Father” (Isaiah 9:6). If you think of it for even a moment, you’re over your head in a cold sea of imponderables that thousands of years later we still can’t get to the bottom of: That baby is God.
In that baby, God became man. For centuries, in his Word, the Creator took great pains to teach his people not to identify him with anything in his whole creation; that sin was idolatry and the penalty was death. And now the Creator has gone and done it himself. He is a thing in his creation, a creature.
God becomes man without ceasing to be God. And not just “man”—a baby! Now the Infinite has a birthday. The Absolutely Independent has become utterly helpless. He Who Changes Not will turn into a toddler, then a boy, then a man. Divine Omnipresence has a hometown, and Divine Omniscience will go off to school and find out just how much he has to learn. He will set about learning it, and learn it well.
God becomes man—finite and dependent and changeable—without becoming one bit less infinite, independent, and unchangeable. There in the stable, God nurses at the breast of Mary, and in the words of an Eastern church father, “When he sucked her milk, he was also giving the drops of rain.” Another church father said, “The more I ponder this, the more I suffer.” In other words, the more I think about this, the bigger my headache gets.
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