Dressed as Eastern shepherds, a group of men stood self-consciously
around the crib where a doll lay amid the straw. This was Cardiff City Temple
choir’s nativity play, part of its annual Christmas program. All was going
according to script, until, suddenly, the “doll” moved! The shepherds, choir
and congregation were stunned—there was real life in the manger!
It was only afterwards that the secret came out: someone had
replaced the doll with a living baby. But that’s the truth about Christmas. God
doesn’t keep to our script. He replaces our easily manageable “dolls” with
shocking reality; the conquering hero of Jewish messianic dreams slips
unobtrusively into the world as a village girl’s baby, his royal palace is the
stable of a Bethlehem inn.—But there’s life in the manger!
Often our ideas about Christmas are bland and sentimental:
the “little Lord Jesus” who, according to the carol, doesn’t cry; the “silent
night” where “all is calm, all is bright”; the trio of exotic kings and their
shiny gifts; the air-brushed pictures of the cleanest animals that ever
inhabited a stable. Moist-eyed parents watch little Wayne and Jemima in school
nativity plays; record shops are awash with the latest seasonal celebrity
discs: hard-nosed businessmen send “appropriate” cards adorned with Old
Masters’ versions of the nativity. So long as Jesus is left in the manger, so
long as he doesn’t move, everyone is happy to celebrate Christmas.
The trouble is—he does move! The “little Lord Jesus” grows
up and begins to move down country lanes and city streets, on storm-tossed seas
and lonely deserts. And he does cry—weeping with bereaved sisters at a brother’s grave, weeping over a
doomed city that had rejected him, weeping great gut-wrenching sobs as he
wrestles with demonic powers in the darkness of Gethsemane. There’s little calm
where Jesus is.
Incarnation is not just a pretty story. It means labour
pains, blood and tears, a crying baby’s disturbed nights, parenting anxieties,
struggling teenage years and manhood, the cost of sacrificial ministry and the
trauma of the cross. Jesus birth is not only singing angels and worshipping
wise men, but also Herod’s savage sword dripping with baby blood. Christmas is
not so much a day for party hats as for tin hats. It is “D-Day,”—God invades
planet earth to “destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and
free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death ”
(Hebrews 2:14–15).
Bethlehem is more than a birthplace, it is a bridgehead—the
place where the liberating Christ begins his march to final conquest; the place
where the despotic ambitions of Herod, and following him, all the high command
of hell’s warlords, are “vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.”
The real Jesus is not a manageable doll, shelved with the
rest of the Christmas trivia until next year. He is the living Christ of God
coming into the world as prophet, priest and king. He declares the truth God
commands us to hear; the only mediator who can restore a meaningful
relationship with God; he comes to establish God’s final authority over people
and nations.
The Christ of Bethlehem summons us to acknowledge his
Lordship, accept his saving power, and follow him as he goes forth to wage war
on the hosts of darkness and establish the Kingdom of God. Incarnation means
invasion; it is a war on error, and it calls for more than celebration; it
calls for consecration and commitment. Party if you will, but prepare to follow
the King as he leads his church against the gates of hell. You’ll need a tin
hat for that!
Excerpted from Reflections: Looking at Timeless Truths in a
Changing World, with permission, copyright © John Lancaster 2010
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