The Stepping Block Christmas

Have you ever felt that Christmas is just a stepping block to Easter? The only reason we celebrate Christ’s birth is because Christ also died and one cannot die unless one is born. So we celebrate his birth. It almost seems somewhat tedious. The church spends four weeks preparing for his coming only so we can celebrate his death and resurrection. Most churches recognize the Advent season as a preparation for his coming (Advent actually means “coming”) and prepare sermons and worship accordingly. Yet, in all of our talk about Christ’s birth it is only a prelude to Easter, or even his 2nd coming. It’s almost as if Jesus became man in order to come again because it is only in his second coming that judgment and perfection occur. (I realize I am making broad sweeping claims. I also realize there are many churches who truly approach advent reverently and honestly).

I’ve been thinking a lot about the significance of Christmas this year. I’ve been looking at it more from a soteriological aspect than anything else. What does Christmas mean in the grand scheme of salvation? I think it goes deeper than just being born in order to get to the cross and ultimately to be raised to life. I think we venerate the cross and resurrection while leaving the incarnation behind. Or, as some would say, we place the point of the incarnation on the cross or at the point of the resurrection rather than in the baby Jesus. Thus Christmas is just a stepping block.

I think the incarnation plays a more important role in theology and in our lives than we Protestants would like to admit. St. Gregory the Theologian once wrote, “the unassumed is unhealed.” Man could not have been healed unless God had taken on man’s nature. God took on our humanity as an act of restoration, an act of deliverance, and ultimately an act of love. In other words, man cannot get to God so God comes to man. The ultimate goal of salvation is found in the incarnation. The birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus must be viewed as a whole with the same purpose of bringing man to bear the divine image. The Son of God became man in order to make man sons of God.

While I certainly assert that one cannot understand the birth of Jesus without wrestling with his death, I also assert that one cannot understand his death without first wrestling with his birth. I often think that most of our Protestant “salvation” messages leave out the incarnation. We spend so much time on a conversion “moment” of forgiveness that we dulled the message of salvation to the sole purpose of forgiveness of sin. While forgiveness is important, we leave out the incarnational message of Christ. Mainly, salvation is about wholeness and renewed life, not just about the heaven beyond life. Or, if I may be so bold, it is all about heaven. It is about heaven meeting earth, it is about the eternal touching the temporal, it is about the divine life assuming human suffering. “Your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.”

The incarnation puts into words the hope of our salvation: that we may be like Christ. The incarnation recognizes that peace is an alternate lifestyle. Christmas is a time to recognize that Christ’s birth is God identifying himself with man: the sinful, hurting, painful, suffering of humanity. This identity with man shows us not what is a distant potential but a coming, and already come, reality. We Christians live in this expectation, leaning into the future of love and peace as faithful witnesses to the Kingdom that Christ's birth brings. When we see replicas of baby Jesus in his manger full of hay, may we this year remember that the God-man does not merely offer us “a way around suffering, but a way through it; not substitution, but saving companionship” (Bishop Kallistos Ware of the Orthodox Church). I wonder if our salvation is found more in our relationship to the incarnational Christ (and to others) rather than some substitutional atonement. Perhaps salvation is found in the incarnation and resurrecting power of God while the cross actually becomes the way in which we are to live.