With Us and For Us
Advent maybe means the arrival of the baby king and our anticipation thereof, but I think for me Advent means that yet another holiday season is about to bear down upon me. It is the whirlwind between Thanksgiving, which is famous for eating, and New Year’s Day, which is famous for (ahem) drinking. It is Santa Claus and trees and reindeer and sleighs and elves and giant furry monsters and nutcrackers dancing. It is the constant swirl of activity and lights and smells and the earnest pleading for me to “Have a Merry Christmas.” It’s the season where I’m told above all else to “enjoy” myself. So in the moments when I’m not enjoying myself, I feel a bit guilty. We are always told, it seems, to be ready for Christmas and yet we never seem to arrive at Christmas.
It’s as if we get prepared in Advent for something that doesn’t actually exist and that we can never experience. It is a waiting for something that, when it arrives, we don’t recognize it.
And maybe we really don’t want what Christmas brings us. Oh, I understand that Christmas is associated with giving, and I have no issue with that. You can be as simple or as splurging as you want, and it’s not something I worry about. And Christmas is associated with community and family and celebrations, and those are all OK.
But the actual Christmas of Christmas—what is that which we are waiting for?
It almost seems anticlimactic when it arrives, when we find out what it is. Christmas is about the arrival of a baby. Not even a holiday celebrated in the early times—the believers mostly talked about Jesus’ life and death and resurrection, not his birth. That was almost a given, that God came to earth to take on our form. (I do hope you realize that before Christmas God and humanity were never united; after Christmas God became permanently entwined with who we are. It’s really quite unique.) But later, as believers thought about it, they came to the conclusion that we could remember the birth of Jesus with as much celebration as we do remember the death and subsequent resurrection of Jesus.
Christmas gives meaning to Easter. The birth of God as a man here on Earth set up the whole journey of God taking up a cross, dying in his body, and being brought back to life.
We think about Christmas as if it has to be more important than it feels to us—as if we should make some feelings occur inside us. So when I’m told these amazing things, I feel like I should be more impressed, somehow, and that I should react more strongly.
But—this isn’t what Christmas is about. It’s not about making myself feel something. It’s about simply remembering what happened, thinking about it, and then trying to figure out what it means to me.
If God became man, then he’s like me in how he experiences life. If Jesus cut his finger when a knife blade slipped while making furniture—then he experienced the same pain I do. (And as he was “tempted in all ways except without sin,” he felt the same urge I do to calm my nerves by shouting certain words—but with Jesus he might have been tempted to call out “Me, Me!” But I digress…)
He had to be fully and completely human. All the same restrictions and misunderstandings. All the same failed relationships and hopes. All the same disappointments with people, all the same good advice handed out to people who never, ever listened. All the same frustrations and challenges and joys and even the feeling that happiness would always pass away.
So Christmas isn’t just about a baby in a crib. It isn’t just about kings and gold and angels and songs. That’s just the celebration of the actual birth.
Christmas is about God coming down and becoming someone just like us. Someone who is God-sized and man-sized. Someone who retained all his love and mercy and hope, and yet became a man limited by his body and his surroundings.
And Advent can then go from being something I work myself up to feel something about to the wonderful assurance of this reminder that yes, God understands me because he once came down from heaven.
God is not only for us, he is with us.
