Why Christmas is my favourite time of the year

By Rev Christy Capper
Director of Missiology with Mission Resourcing and Uniting College for Leadership & Theology

Posted Dec 21, 2016 in Faith

I know that Christmas is a busy time of year. There’s so much to do! There’s the usual Christmas chaos, school wrapping up for the year, and a rush of work that needs to be done – particularly when you’re involved in a church. Last year, the church I was serving had over 6,000 people visit within 24 hours over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. To say it was crazy would be an understatement – my theological training did not prepare me for overseeing the security guards we had hired!

In spite of all of the crazy busyness that is associated with Christmas, it is my favourite time of the year – not only because of the quality time I can spend with my extended family, but also because of the theology associated with the Christmas story.

The incarnation is one of the greatest mysteries of faith, that the God of all creation would become human – not some powerful ruler, not a wizard from Hogwarts nor a superhero with amazing powers, but human. God became a tiny, fragile newborn baby. A baby not born to the elites of society in a nice private room in hospital, but born in a farm shed that did not even belong to his parents.

The Christmas story is the story of a God who subverts our human values and expectations, a God whose mighty strength is embodied in a newborn baby. It sounds crazy – if God had run this salvation method past a panel of humans, they’d surely say it was too risky. What if something were to happen to the baby during its birth, especially given the somewhat unhygienic environment and lack of medical interventions available? What if the child was to be hurt in some way or succumb to illness during childhood? Wouldn’t it be better if the parents were rich and socially well connected so that the God-human might speak to those people of influence? No, I cannot imagine that a panel would have approved God’s risky plan. Yet the plan went ahead, and in the birth of Jesus, we see a God who is willing to be humbled, to learn, and to engage in the highs and lows that come with being human.

So here is some good news! God is not like us. God’s chosen method for the salvation of humanity shows us that the Kingdom of God is unlike anything we have known before. Through the incarnation, we see that the Kingdom of God is not only for the rich and powerful, but for the poor and the oppressed, the lonely and the heartbroken, the overlooked and the undermined. In Jesus, God understands what it is like to be human, to be born, to live and to die, and all of the struggles that lie in between.

The incarnation affirms the goodness of our world; the goodness of creation and humanity in spite of the problems of sin. In Genesis, when God finished creation, it was proclaimed to be “very good”. In the incarnation, by becoming human, God reaffirms and recommits to the “very goodness” of the world. We see this in Jesus’ proclamation of the arrival of the Kingdom of God, even before his death and resurrection.

Christmas is my favourite time of year because it shows me that God understands my humanness; that God is willing to take risks to bring salvation, and that God stands alongside those who are oppressed, downcast or broken.

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