In my last blog I reflected on the meaning of grace at Christmas time, and I’ve been thinking more about it since then. At Christmas time we hear a lot about peace, joy, and love; yet there are two words not popularly associated with Christmas – grace and mercy. Nevertheless, more than any others these words probably reflect the true heart of Christmas.
While we can easily get caught up in the hype that is ‘Xmas’, CHRISTmas is a reminder that despite what Bette Midler’s popular song suggests, “God is watching from a distance” – in fact is not distant but God is with us. Christmas celebrates that God travelled across an impossible and infinite distance to be born a human being amongst us.
Locked in time and place in a body, God’s Son put his power to one side and traded the throne room of heaven for a feed trough in a stable. Becoming human means he shares our frailty and experiences our delicate lives. The miracle of the incarnation is that God overcomes the divide between earth and heaven and between creation and creator and becomes one of us. Living the journey from baby to adult he lives the journey of life and learns what it is to cry, to crawl, and to walk; what it is to experience not only joy and love, but also loneliness, despair, pain, grief, loss and ultimately death.
He lived a life like no other human before or since. In Jesus, God did what we could not do ourselves. He lived the life as humans were always meant to live but never could. He succeeded where we all fail. Paradoxically, he paid the penalty we should have paid and died the death we deserved. Yet in doing so he won for us a life that we were never entitled to. Through no effort of our own we receive mercy and forgiveness, all because of what he did.
This is a call for great celebration. This is the grace of Christmas. But it is not all. Grace is not limited just to Christmas. God isn’t just in the season. With the coming of the Holy Spirit, God is with us all time. God did not just pay us a visit and disappear. No, God remains intimately connected with us. God is present with us in every situation and shares with us at every moment. Whether that moment is good or bad, full of joy or sorrow, whether we are holy or sinful, whether we are alive or dead, God is with us.
This is what the angel meant with he said to Mary that her baby would be “Immanuel, God is with us.” This is Christmas grace.
As we celebrate Advent this year and as we draw near to Christmas Day, may our hearts be sensitive to the reality that God is with us. In our everyday life God is there to meet us in the midst of it. May the grace of Christmas be an inspiration and an encouragement to you in the days ahead and indeed throughout the year to come.
Random thoughts of a fellow traveller