Christmas Perspective

 Sometimes I think we get things all turned around.  Christmas – happy, happy, happy!  Good Friday – sad, sad, sad.  Christmas – let’s deck the halls!  Good Friday – strip the altar bare.  We do this because we see everything from our own perspective, the perspective of flesh.  Birth – yay!  Death – boo!  

But were we to see this from God’s perspective of spirit, the picture would be quite different.  The Incarnation was God’s death sentence.  Christmas was God’s consignment to death row, as John Piper says.  That’s why the outcast shepherds were given the sign of a baby wrapped in grave cloths (strips of cloth) and lying in a manger.  A manger was not a wooden crèche as depicted by St. Francis.  The manager was a stone trough in the grotto that served as a sheep pen.  The sign was a baby that looked like a corpse laid out on a burial slab.  The Son’s love for the Father was so great he didn't resign himself to death – he embraced it as his mission from the very beginning.  

From God’s perspective, Christmas was much harder than Good Friday.  Christmas was the descent from glory into hell’s dungeon. Good Friday was the victory over death and Hell.  Christmas was Heaven’s 9/11; Good Friday was the Fourth of July, prisoners set free, rebels given a kingdom.  Christmas is Mary not telling everything she knows.  Good Friday is Mary at the foot of the cross.  Christmas is the distraction of sight and song and crowded inns.  Good Friday the lonely epiphany of redemption planned from the foundation of the world.  The angels sang on that first nativity announcing the invasion of rebel space; on Good Friday all heaven proclaimed the kingdoms of this world have become the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.  Christ burst from the tomb for nothing in this time-space continuum could hold him.

I will, of course, be happy this Christmas as I hope you will be.  But in these dark and uncertain times when evil rears its ugly head at Sandy Hook like some modern Herod rampaging through Ramah, do not listen to the godless decrying the helplessness of deity.  God has prevailed.  God accepts the blame for that part of his providence that causes suffering; God confines himself to death row at Christmas; on Good Friday God let’s himself be slaughtered as the Ultimate Innocent to not only identify with us, but to purchase a people who accept the grisly sacrifice of Calvary and truly wonder at the spirit-love that is Christmas.