Have you ever stopped to think how sanitised and false Christmas can be? The house and yard are made to look neat and tidy, the kids have to be good or Santa won't come, the shops are beautifully decorated, soft Christmas music is piped everywhere - it is the season of peace and goodwill!
When tragedies happen at Christmas time it seems more unjust than at other times. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour close to Christmas Day that was all the more tragic and affronting because it was Christmas. When Cyclone Tracy hit Darwin on Christmas Day the tragic loss of life and terrible damage seemed worse because it was Christmas. When deaths and road accidents happen at Christmas, they seem the more sad and tragic because it is Christmas.
We celebrate Christmas in the shadow of so many tragedies: Shootings, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, climate change, ongoing pain in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and in so many parts of our world. According to the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, by the end of 2016, the number of displaced people had risen to 65.6 million.
Have you ever stopped to think how sanitised and false Christmas can be? The house and yard are made to look neat and tidy, the kids have to be good or Santa won't come, the shops are beautifully decorated, soft Christmas music is piped everywhere … it is the season of peace and goodwill!
When we take the messiness out of Christmas and welcome the birth of Jesus with everything squeaky clean we miss the point! By doing this we render God ineffective. This kind of baby Jesus would never have messed his nappies! He is above and beyond us. He is to be found only when life is going well, when all is nice and tidy! WE WON'T LET HIM BE HUMAN when we treat him like this.
Don't you find it ironic that at Christmas we don't want the messiness of the world pushed at us? Yet, that is precisely why Jesus was born! God wanted to share ALL that it means to be human! Not just all that is 'nice' but the awful mess we live in - our pain, our tears, our confusion, our vulnerability, our wrong-doing, our sickness, our hatreds, our aggression, our wars, our fears, our dying and our death - ALL OF IT!
When we allow Jesus to be born into all our mess, we allow him to touch the deepest needs of our frail humanity. This baby Jesus gets colic and nappy rash!
Avery Dulles once put it this way: "The incarnation does not provide us with a ladder by which to escape the ambiguities of life and scale the heights of heaven. Rather it enables us to burrow deep into the heart of planet earth and find it shimmering with divinity."
Christmas doesn't rid the world of evil. On Christmas Day and after Christmas, for the
Christian and everyone else for that matter, there will still be pain, sickness, death, war, terrorism, senseless hurt, broken dreams and cold, lonely seasons when love is far away. Christmas doesn't promise heaven on earth! Rather, it promises us, here on earth, something else - it promises us God's presence in our lives.
May that promise encourage you this Christmas and may God always be present to you at all times!
