How was your Christmas?

"How was your Christmas?" seems to be the standard greeting at this time of year. Mostly I suppose people to be inquiring about the various cultural aspects that have aggregated around this season of the year. Which is a little problematic, because those are precisely the sort of thing that seem to me to make the season more on the burdensome side than on the delightful and wondrous side.

But when I stop to consider this Christmas season (which liturgically starts on December 25, rather than ending on it), there have been some things that have made this Christmas season actually much more like what I understand Christmas to be about theologically than have most.

For starters, one of the problems I usually find about Christmas is that the churches of my experience never really wanted to deal with the direct significance of Jesus' birth — that God Himself took on human form — something that ought to make us stagger. Instead, there was always a great rush to get to Good Friday. Year after year, the most repeated message I would get in church as we approached Christmas was that the birth of Jesus really was nothing of importance at all. Someone (or more usually several someones) would decidedly proclaim from the pulpit (or other official place) that everyone always gets all caught up in the baby at Christmas, and totally forgets that the real gift from God was not the baby but the death on the cross. I always thought this strange, since the other complaint that came even more predicably at Christmas was how everyone always forgot that Jesus had anything to do with Christmas whatsoever.

Even more odd, when we did get to Good Friday, no one really wanted to spend any time then contemplating just what the cross involved in terms of God's taking up of humanity either — instead everyone was now in a rush to get to Easter. In many ways, I think that our churches have taken on a very heavy dose of either gnostic or docetic dualism — we are really big about the divine nature of Jesus, but really quite squeamish about his humanity. We like the idea that Jesus was God, but please let's not talk too much about Jesus being truly — that gets God a little bit too much in our face, perhaps, or too much in the "muck" of life.

This Christmas season, however, I managed to avoid hearing anyone churn out that old saw about Christmas really being about the cross — the first time in many, many years. I heard a wonderful lecture by Mark Strom, read an amazing novel by Anne Rice, and this morning listened to a very passionate lecture by Dr. Cherith Nordling, all of which took the Incarnation far more seriously than I am used to encountering at Christmas, even though Dr. Nordling's topic was more directly on Resurrection than on Christmas. Our ultimate destiny is to be raised with Jesus into the fully redeemed full humanity that is His — and so far only His, as none of us have as yet been truly human as He was even in this broken world.

God the Son was willing to join us fully in our broken humanity — even to carrying the scars of that broken humanity with Him into eternity — so that we might ultimately join Him in a true and whole humanity that truly reflects the image of God.

Yes indeed, it has truly been a good Christmas.