The Other Meaning of Christmas

We all know the Christmas story, most of us have since we were children. We know about the census, about putting a pregnant Mary on a donkey for the long ride to Bethlehem, about there being no room at the inn, and about having to give birth in a stable. We can tell you all about the swaddling clothes, the shepherds and the wise men, we can even tell you that the true meaning of Christmas is to celebrate the birth of the King of Kings, the birth of the man who would eventually die for our sins. But that's not the whole meaning of Christmas.

Don't get me wrong, I don't dispute that the birth of our Savior is a vitally important part of the meaning of Christmas. To do so would be foolish. But the birth of Jesus is not just a milestone on the way to Easter, it is more than that. We must never forget that in that little stable, God became flesh. The divine became human. The creator of all was condensed down into a little, red faced, screaming baby. A helpless baby that was totally dependent on others for his survival.

He left his mother's womb, a place of warmth and safety, and was thrust out into a world that smelled of sheep dung and rotting hay. He left the security that was heaven, and entered into a world of confusion and pain. He descended into the depths of all it means to be human. The One who was all powerful made himself breakable.

The first hands to touch him were not soft, they were the calloused, hardened hands of a carpenter. There was no one standing by holding the richest silks to wrap him in; his mother just wrapped him tightly in an old blanket. He felt hunger, and was powerless to feed himself. The one who sustained the world now relied on a very young girl to provide for him. God had become fully human.

What happened in the stable that night was miraculous. The miraculous part was not that God could become flesh–surely the one responsible for all of creation could do such a thing–but that God chose to do such a thing. This was not a God who sat high on Mount Olympus, content just to watch creation. This was a God with such love for us that he came down from the highest heaven and became one of us. Our God was one who chose not to enter the world in a position of power or surrounded by majesty, but rather in a position of utter helplessness, the way we all enter it.

God wanted to prove to us untrusting, skeptical, imperfect humans that there really was no place we could ever go where God was not with us. Because God was human, there is no place that we can go where God has not been before; there is no pain that we can feel that God has not felt before. From the filth and stench of a stable to the pain of death and beyond, our God is with us, sharing our pain, loving us, and helping us to heal. That's the other glorious message of Christmas.

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