Life is hard.
Everything in a cursed world is hard.
Not surprisingly then, for many, Christmas is hard.
It is as if the hardness of everything else in life gets aggravated at Christmas. If you suffer grief and loneliness all year long, you feel extra bereft and alone at Christmas. If you’re poor, you feel doubly poor at Christmas. If you’re suffering in any way, Christmas often feels like salt in the wound.
When I was 10 years old, my parents suffered a truly terrible divorce. It cut my brothers and me off from both sides of the extended family. We went from an upper middle class standard of living to thrift clothes, no heat in the house, Food Stamps and Welfare. Not to mention, fear of everything and everyone. In my new life, Christmas became a day that exacerbated my misery. It was as if the coming of Christmas made me feel still more cast-away than I already felt.
On two successive Christmases, our modest house’s sewage pipes utterly backed up. Because one of my teenage brothers worked at place where you could rent equipment, my brothers and I spent two consecutive Christmases “snaking” our pipes to the street. It seemed a fitting metaphor for what Christmas had become for me: stopped up in human waste, with no plumber to help.
Mary at Christmas
Over the years, it became comforting to realize that the real, biblical Christmas was different from the American vision of Christmas that tormented me. For example, the very first Christmas was hard for the human being closest to it: Mary, the mother of Jesus. Andrew Peterson’s beautiful song, “Labor of Love,” starts:
It was not a silent night, there was blood on the ground;
You could hear a woman cry in the alleyways that night,
on the streets of David’s town. . . .
In Luke 2:1–7, Mary’s labor and delivery seem ordinary in every which way (e.g. ordinarily anguishing) — except, that there was the added whiff of scandal (v.5). Therefore, she suffered a lack of ordinary welcome and communal support for her laborious delivery (v.7).
In Genesis 3:16, God says to Eve: “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.” Pain. Multiplied. Surely. Why does each mother willingly bear it? In a word, “advent” — the joy of her child “come” into the world (cf. John 16:21). Mary bears this anguish, not only for her family, but for the whole world. For all history.
God at Christmas
But as we get closer still to ground zero of Christmas, let us marvel at the One for whom, in a certain sense, it was supremely not a silent night: our Heavenly Father himself.
To give us a glimpse of this reality, God repeatedly confronts his people, through the prophet Isaiah, with their failure to be what he called them to be: a conduit of redemptive blessing to the world. A few times this failure is put in the language of failed child-birthing. In 26:18, against the backdrop of God’s judgments of the nations, God’s people “whisper” (v.16) their missional failure:
“We were pregnant, we writhed, but we have given birth to wind.
We have accomplished no deliverance in the earth. . . .”
Confronting his people’s idolatrous trust in political protectors rather than in the Lord himself, God says of their scheming: “You conceive chaff; you give birth to stubble. . .” (33:11).
And finally, even godly King Hezekiah, when confronted with the threat of Assyrian exile and his own divided trusts, cries out in contrition: “This day is a day of distress, of rebuke and of disgrace; children have come to the point of birth, and there is no strength to bring them forth” (37:3).
God’s people are not able to give birth to redemption of the world. As the apostle Paul would summarize, all (including God’s own people) have fallen short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23). No matter our plans, powers, gifts, activism, and money in today’s church, we too fall short of bringing God’s salvation shalom to our nation and world.
But at this point of dismay and failure, consider that the pain of childbirth since Genesis 3 turns out to be a prophetic foreshadowing of God’s own anguished labor in bringing forth redemption. Hear God’s graphic language in Isaiah 42:14, about what He himself goes through in bringing his salvation justice and shalom into the world:
“For a long time I have held my peace; I have kept still and restrained myself;
now I will cry out like a woman in labor; I will gasp and pant.”
God crying out, gasping and panting???!!! Not only was Christmas Eve not a silent night for Mary. Infinitely more so, it was not a silent night for God himself, as he brings forth his only begotten Son. So the "pain surely multiplied” isn’t only a curse on fallen humankind. It is also a sign of what God himself would go through in birthing the redemption of His cursed world.
Why would God endure this? What does this say about his own heart for us? It tells us God is absolutely “all in,” to his own hurt, as it were, to save his people. To save his whole creation (cf. Isa. 11:1–10; 65:17–25). To “make his blessings flow far as the curse is found. It speaks of what he’s willing to endure in bringing forth “the dawn of redeeming grace” (Silent Night).
So Christmas is a time to marvel in wonder at God’s own gasping and panting to bring forth redemption through the birth of his Son. In addition, it is a time to see the foreshadowing of God the Son’s own gasping and panting to come. For Jesus would go through life in a cursed world, and death on the Cross, in order to birth a world made new (Rev. 21:1,5). If Mary’s was a “labor of love;” how much more was God the Father’s at the birth of Jesus; and Jesus the Son’s in His life, death and resurrection!
Pain at Christmas
Christmas remains hard because it signals only the beginning of redemption, not its consummation. Mary would live out the rest of her days as a scarlet-lettered village peasant, likely widowed young, after seeing her son crucified. Poor, outcast shepherds who witnessed the heavenly host would remain just that: poor, outcast shepherds. Simeon died, not having heard a single word from the Savior he long awaited. Anna would likely remain a long-time widow she had been for decades, even after encountering Jesus. Male babies and toddlers in the region of Bethlehem would be slaughtered, due to the arrival of Jesus (Mt. 2:13-18). And generations of the church would remain under Roman domination (and other political dominations in succeeding centuries), even after Christ’s exaltation in his resurrection and ascension to his Father’s right hand. In short, for those closest to the Christmas coming of Jesus, in so much of their lives, nothing changed.
But it is even more true that all of the participants in the first Christmas recognized that something new had broken in, something that would change everything. An eternal life had been given to everything true, good and beautiful. A death sentence had been given to everything false, evil and ugly. The world would not only be restored to a prior Edenic glory. It would be restored to a glory far exceeding that which previously existed. In light of the first Christmas, it was only a matter of time.
For us in the 21st century, it is still only a matter of time. But we must humbly remember that we too still wait for the making of “all things new” (Rev. 21:5). Loved ones will still be hospitalized and die, leaving empty chairs at the Christmas table. Some of our babies and children will still die tragically young. People never-married and once-married will still feel the pangs of loneliness. People still-married will experience ongoing marital difficulties. Broken, estranged and conflicted families remain so on Christmas Day.
In C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, before the children came, it was “always winter, never Christmas.” Americans have this idea that if we just have: a happy marriage, beautiful children, a loving extended family, a successful career, a dream house, chestnuts roasting on an open fire (does anyone still do that?), a perfect feast and “white Christmas;” then, we can experience what one former colleague termed, “always Christmas, never winter.”
How many of us, or our family members, watch one Hallmark Christmas movie after another, pining for one happy ending after another. Where love is love. Home is home. Belonging is belonging. Happiness is happiness. Life is life. These pinings are God-given, and they deserve the fullest of fulfillments. But contrary to Hallmark wishful thinking, Christmas does not yet bring “happily ever after.” The real, biblical Christmas only brings the beginnings of the promised redemption.
So those with faulty plumbing and lots of tree roots invading it, they may still need to snake their pipes on Christmas. Unheated houses may remain unheated. Widowed saints remain widowed. Poor and underemployed saints may remain so for the duration of life.
But if everyday misery in a cursed world makes us feel like Christmas only passes us by, that is because we’ve unwittingly placed our hope in a wrong vision of Christmas. In the biblical Christmas, the exact opposite is true. Our Father gasped and panted to birth redemption. Mary gasped and panted to bring Jesus into the world. God’s son Jesus gasped and panted on the Cross to accomplish redemption. All of this happened in order that the redemption birthed at Christmas might come precisely to: the poor, the one who mourns, the meek, the reviled and exiled, the one who hungers and thirsts for what is most right and real (cf. Mt. 5:1-12).
If Christmas feels hard to celebrate this year, please know: Jesus came particularly and especially for you, and to you. “Unto us, a child is born; unto us, a son is given” (Isa. 9:2-7; Lk. 2:10-11).
May God rest us merry in the tidings of comfort and joy, of a salvation bugun. The poor will be made “rich toward God” (Luke 12:21). The orphan will be placed in the family of families (Ps. 68:5–6; Eph. 2:19). The Bridegroom of bridegrooms will come for the unmarried, divorced and widowed (Isa. 54:4–5; Jn. 3:29). Every disease will be ultimately healed (Matt. 8:16–17). We will be freed from the disease of diseases, sin (Mark 2:17). And death itself will die (1 Cor. 15:26-28). Our Father and Elder Brother have gasped and panted to make everything guilting, shaming, isolating, impoverishing, enslaving, immiserating and deadening come untrue.
