Christmas Unexpected

“Behold," said God through the prophet Malachi—the very last words He would give to an Old Testament prophet, "I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”  

  

Before the Christ would come to rescue Israel, God promised to send Elijah, perhaps the greatest of the Old Testament Prophets. His coming would herald the coming of the Lord, preparing the hearts and minds of Israel for their salvation.

The people of Israel must have anticipated something truly spectacular. Elijah’s first appearance, after all, was sufficiently dramatic. Israel was under the rule of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, a remarkably maleficent pair, who had turned Israel away from God and turned the Priests of God into priests of Ba’al. The story begins with Elijah calling upon God to cause a drought in Israel, and culminates in his calling down fire from the heavens to consume the enemies of God, restoring the power of God to Israel. How much greater, then, would be his second coming?

Surely Elijah would come in even greater power this time! He would perform miracles, perhaps even drive the Romans out of Israel as he had once driven out the prophets of Ba’al, and then Christ, the Messiah, would follow and take up His throne to rule over all of Israel and raise up the nation over all the kings of the earth.

It could never have worked this way. These expectations (as all expectations) spoke far more about the selfish desires of Israel than the truth of God’s plan for salvation. One ought to be very careful about their expectations of God, for He is bound to defy them.  

One can only guess at what Zechariah, as a priest of Israel, might have believed about all of this. Perhaps the fact that he was chosen of God says something about his character, or perhaps God was simply out to do something remarkable. But of this we can be sure: While alone in the holy place of the temple, an angel appeared to Zechariah and promised him a son: "He will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before Him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared." Zechariah could not have misunderstood. He certainly would have known that the angel was echoing the last words of Malachi. Israel may have been hard-hearted, but this promise could not have been clearer: the sign Israel had been waiting for had come at last! Elijah was on his way, and he would be born, remarkably, into the priesthood. 

Surely he understood this! And Mary, as well, seemed to understand her own role, as she boldly conveyed in her Magnificat the glorious things that her son was destined to do.  

  

Still, despite this understanding, they could not have truly understood. They knew it would be great; they knew that their children were destined to powerful things, that they were the fulfillment of centuries of promise. Mary was certainly even prepared to bow to her own son, to worship Him as Lord, but even she could not have predicted just how it was all to play out—for God continued to defy expectations at every turn (only in hindsight could it be seen that it had, in fact, all happened just as the prophets had declared).   

  

God is never above throwing his prognosticators for a loop.  

  

God seems to revel in irony, but the source of the irony is always our own failure to understand. When God defies our expectations, it only shows that our expectations were at fault, never God. It may seem strange to us that, though much of Jesus' future ministry would be spent demonstrating the abuses of the priesthood and the apathy into which Israel had fallen; the Christmas story begins with an announcement given to a priest, within the temple's holy places. But God was merely using the priesthood that He Himself had established in order to prepare the way for a far greater priesthood! And it seems counterintuitive that the promise should be given to Zechariah—old and childless, whose wife was equally old and barren. But what else could have been expected of the God who brought Israel about in the first place through an identical promise to Abraham? What else from the God who had never ceased demonstrating his power over the womb? Miraculous conceptions are one of God's great reoccurring miracles: It happened with Sarah, with Hannah, with Elizabeth, and, of course, with Mary it would take its greatest form. It is a miracle that has not ceased today.  

  

At Christmas, the assumptions of men were proven wrong at every turn: John would be the firstborn son of a priest of Israel, but he would not be a priest himself. He would eschew the glories of the priesthood for the infamy of life as an itinerant preacher, his priestly robes and food replaced with clothes of animal skins and meals of locusts and wild honey. Though Zechariah may have truly desired a son to whom he could pass down his own priestly duties, this was never part of God's plan. When God opens a womb, it is rarely for the benefit of the parents. Isaac was not born for the sake of Abraham, but for the sake of the promise (as Abraham was made to realize painfully on Mt. Moriah); Samuel was not born merely so that Hannah could have a son, but to be a servant of God and the beginning of a prophetic tradition; John was not just a gift for Zechariah and Elizabeth, but a gift for all of Israel; and Christ was not just a blessing for Mary and Joseph (for, under the circumstances, it really is hard to see it as a blessing in the traditional sense), but a blessing for the world and for all of eternity.   

  

The ironies continue: The circumstances of Christ’s birth could not have been more humble; and yet, after coming into this world in a stable, surrounded by livestock, and living his first three decades in anonymity, who could have guessed that he would one day have to flee from the crowds who wanted desperately to make him King over Israel? Surely no one could have understood why Herod should have been so afraid of a baby born in poverty and conceived, so it appeared, in adultery, but Herod was not wrong to feel threatened. The child was, indeed, an enemy, but an enemy that could not be defeated by the sword. 

  

In the Christmas story, the great and beautiful contrasts of the Gospel are first glimpsed in all of their beauty, and they would continue throughout the life and ministry of Christ. As James Stewart wonderfully describes in his book, "The Strong Name":  

  

He was the meekest and lowliest of all the sons of men, yet He spoke of coming on the clouds of heaven with the glory of God. He was so austere that evil spirits and demons cried out in terror at His coming, yet He was so genial and winsome and approachable that the children loved to play with Him, and the little ones nestled in His arms. His presence at the innocent gaiety of a village wedding was like the presence of sunshine. No one was half so compassionate to sinners, yet no one ever spoke such red hot scorching words about sin. A bruised reed He would not break, His whole life was love, yet on one occasion He demanded of the Pharisees how they ever expected to escape the damnation of hell. He was a dreamer of dreams and a seer of visions, yet for sheer stark realism He has all of our stark realists soundly beaten. He was a servant of all, washing the disciples’ feet, yet masterfully He strode into the temple, and the hucksters and money changers fell over one another to get away from the mad rush and the fire they saw blazing in His eyes. He saved others, yet at the last Himself He did not save. There is nothing in history like the union of contrasts which confronts us in the gospels. The mystery of Jesus is the mystery of divine personality. 

  

These contrasts should be seen, not as frightening, but as beautiful. Contrast and irony are not the same as contradictions; they show us only that God has always understood better than we. They convey a breadth and scope to the story that are surely missing from every other so-called god or object of worship; they demonstrate a God who truly understands men; they demonstrate a Messiah who was destined to live and die as all men for all men. They are contrasts and ironies which continue to captivate and continue to be celebrated, drawing us each year back to first century Judea as the story is told, again and again and remembered fondly, even by those who don’t believe a word of it, which is, perhaps, the greatest irony of all.  

Christmas and the Gospel

The story of the Gospel begins at the incarnation. Well, really, it begins thousands of years earlier, in the first chapters of Genesis, where the Gospel is promised, ushering in a long period of expectation. But the story of how God actually reached His hand into human history and brought about the salvation of His people really does begin in the manger, when God Himself became man and dwelt at last among us.

This was the moment that, as Paul described, Christ, though one in the same as God, willingly made Himself nothing. He made Himself man. In fact, He made himself into something less than man—He made Himself a slave to all men. He was not born in a home—he was born in a stable. He did not lie on blankets; he lay on a bed of straw. He did not descend to the world, he descended below the world, to a place meant for animals. He did not die as a leader, He died as a common criminal.

Here, while lying on a manger and worshipped as both God and King only by his family and some shepherds, God began his work. The beginnings were humble and unassuming, and, though one might expect the story to turn here into an underdog tale of a scrappy insurgency into the world, in fact the rest of the story does not stray far—a carpenter like His father, an itinerant teacher who happened to have a message bold and new enough to attract a few followers even before the first of the miracles. The rest of the story came and went like a whirlwind: miracles, confrontations with religious aristocracy, crowds, parables, death, resurrection. Three years of ministry followed by two thousand years (and counting) of wonder and further expectation.

Whether or not we choose to believe it at all, the child in the manger proves the pivot on which the axis of history continues to turn. It continues to be more influential than any war or ruler; it is more dramatic than the rising or falling of any great empire. It stands as the event. The foundation of the Gospel of salvation. Neither the most confused skeptic nor the most hardened humanist can deny with any honesty the influence of the event on the history of the world.

But what is this Gospel that began at the incarnation?

It is something that ought to be desired by man. The word itself scream that it is “good news,” and it really ought to be taken that way. Any expression of the Gospel that does not coincide with this fact, but which turns the Gospel into a mournful or condemning one, is nothing less than a false gospel. The Gospel is not a law, it is not a list of rules, it is nothing less than a promise of salvation.

Still, far too often the “good” is neglected in our expression of the Good News, and the Gospel is taken to be something rather to be ashamed of or to be hid from. We think that the imperfections of the world are things that somehow offer evidence against the Gospel, and we turn meek and mild, thinking that in boldness we might come up against questions we cannot answer. We forget that the long, often sordid history of the Christian faith, though indeed embarrassing at times, is a history that confirms rather than contradicts the message of the Gospel—the same Gospel that began on Christmas Day. The winding road of the church only fortifies what the Bible says of the followers of Christ, who three times fell asleep on the night of the arrest of their master and fought amongst themselves about which of them were the greatest. The peculiar shortcomings of the Disciples, culminating in the threefold denial by Peter, amount to perhaps the perfect cross section of the Christian church as it has existed throughout history. As Christians we continue (so it seems) in a perpetual state of either sleep or denial regarding our faith. We are either apathetic or actively antagonistic toward our creator, and I cannot say which is worse.

The shortcomings of Christians, while regrettable, do nothing to diminish the truth of the Gospel. The Bible is in no way silent about the more embarrassing tendencies of the Christian, just as it is painfully candid about the shortcomings of the Jews. The New Testament does not tell the story of a new, perfect movement, destined to take the world by a storm of righteousness. Though Christmas really did mean the birth of the King, and it really did mean the beginning of a Kingdom, the fullness of the Kingdom and the true reign of the King are yet to be experienced in their fullness. The movement that started on Christmas day is now as it was then—a great, even momentous, struggle; we strive to spread the message of the Kingdom despite facing opposition both from within and without. It is an imperfect movement (though based on perfect principles) that, if we are going to be reasonable, really should have died a young, ignoble death long ago.

Christianity really should never have survived past that first Christmas. The name of Jesus Christ really shouldn’t have outlasted the furniture made by His hands. The religious movement He began really ought to have died with Him. And yet, even in those first years and decades the Christ movement was already proclaiming victory. Christianity, even at the moment when it should have been in the throes of death, declared itself to be a force capable of overwhelming the Earth. The conquering nature of the faith was promised long before there were any signs that such a thing was even possible.

Consider this: Right up until the ministry of Christ and the writing of the New Testament, when God finally announced that the message of his salvation was to be taken to the ends of the Earth—the moment he declared that this formerly localized religion was destined to completely overwhelm civilization—this was an unheard of conceit. The very notion of evangelism in the name of religion was practically unheard of. Religions had, until then, been driven by cultural forces—the culture and the people had created the religion rather than the other way around. It was as true in the Mediterranean world, where the gods of Greece, Rome and Egypt all bore an uncanny likeness to the cultures that bore them, as it was in the East, where Hinduism, Buddhism and the like seem almost inevitable. Before Christ, the only culture ever founded upon religion was that of the Jews, and still, these were a people who seemed to do everything they could to shake off the shackles of God and make Him conform to what they found more comfortable—and to their own demise.

The Jews wanted desperately to be like every other Kingdom—the Egyptians, the Romans, the Greeks, the Persians—who were not bound by religion. The people of these other cultures created gods for themselves that strengthened them. There was nothing challenging or burdensome about their manmade gods. We all recognize the truth that the God of Israel can be difficult to follow; He asks hard things from us and often offers no explanations. Who would dare create such a God? And who could possibly convince others to follow such a God, especially when it requires so much? We can see, in retrospect, that following God, though difficult, truly was the best for the people of Israel—for when they turned from Him it only meant disaster—but it is hard, almost impossible to understand this in the moment.

Still, even for the Israelites there was the sense that God belonged to them alone—that He was a God that had confined Himself to a single people. It is even more astonishing, in light of this, that the New Testament should be so presumptuous as to declare that the Gospel would overrun the world. And bear in mind, this claim is being made at the very time that Paul is writing to some of the earliest churches, who should have been quick to believe, being so inundated with first-hand witnesses of Christ, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you,” or from John: “I know of your works, you have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead.” Who, in light of these letters, in light of the turmoil of the canon debates and the rise of apostasy and Gnosticism and false gospels, could have been confident that such a church could ultimately not just survive, but soar? The early church was many things, but destined to overcome the world it was not.

Indeed, the church could not possibly have succeeded had it been built upon the shoulders of a homely religious leader like Paul or a lowly fisherman who could not hold his tongue like Peter. It could not have been built upon anything other than an absolute, concrete truth. It could not have stood on any shoulders but that of a true King—albeit one born under the lowliest of circumstances. It almost seems that it could not possibly have happened any other way.

The Bible ends with a dramatic prophesy of absolute hope—the revealing of the true, perfect Kingdom over which the Christ Child will reign—but that very same prophesy candidly acknowledges that the church will face tremendous hardships and make many mistakes before this comes about. The Bible ends with what seems to me to be this assurance: If the gospel is anything less than the truth—if the child born on Christmas is anything less than God Himself—rest assured, it will be sent through the fire. It will be purged until only the truth, if there is any truth to be found, will remain. The fires of history have shown that the weaknesses of the faith come in the form of the followers rather than the founder of Christianity. The Bible has withstood the tests of the skeptics, Christ has easily withstood His harshest critics, even when the Christian has failed. There is hope in this.

The history of humanity has always been—indeed, continues to be—a history of waiting for God to come. He came first to the garden and brought both condemnation and hope; He came in the incarnation and brought salvation; He promises to come again to bring the fulfillment of every promise. He came to the garden and Adam hid in his shame. He came to Bethlehem and the King tried to kill him, eventually succeeding. He will come in the end to rescue His people and to conquer and crush His enemies beneath his feet.

The season of Advent represents this time of waiting. It is a time when we ought to reflect upon not just what we are waiting for or who we are waiting for, but how we go about it. How are our lives reflecting our deep anticipation and hope? What roles are we choosing to play in the history of our faith?

If we truly believe the truth of the Gospel that claims itself capable of overtaking the world, why are we so hesitant to take part in this unstoppable force?