The Significance of Christmas
Many believers have heard sermons on ‘The Meaning of Christmas’ no fewer than twenty or thirty times, and are thoroughly familiar with the Gospels and biblical history. Yet is the meaning of Christmas merely to reject commercialisation, proclaim the Gospel, sing carols, and return to church? When Christmas is viewed through the lens of Advent—with its themes of preparation, hope, the Nativity, and the return of the Lord—what do these themes amount to when considered together? This essay attempts to revisit certain historical events before and around the New Testament period from the perspective of God’s chosen people, in order to explore another dimension of Advent and Christmas and to set it alongside what may be observed in contemporary church circles. What follows is a series of theological reflections rather than a rigorous exegetical study; no claim is made that every interpretation of Scripture offered here has been established beyond question.
I. A Chosen People Who Had Lost Their Nation
Returning to the period before the New Testament, we find that, following the division of the kingdom, God’s chosen people endured several centuries of turmoil both within and without. In the 730s BC, civil war between the divided kingdoms stood on the verge of breaking out, and the situation was perilous. Within little more than a decade, the Assyrian armies overwhelmed Aram and Samaria; under the Assyrian policy of deportation and population transfer, the people of Israel were scattered throughout different lands. Judah survived for a time, but could not escape the fate of losing its kingdom a little more than a century later.
From the sixth century BC onwards, Judah passed successively under the rule of three foreign powers. Although the Jews briefly re-established an independent state, in the end they too could not withstand the military might of empire, and suffered greatly under foreign domination. Here were a people who called themselves God’s chosen people, yet whose nation had fallen into the hands of foreigners. Before the eyes of the world, the very title ‘chosen people’ might have seemed almost a mockery. Where, then, was God?
One might, of course, turn to the prophets, in whose writings the Messiah had been foretold. Yet by the first century BC, although the coming of the Messiah remained part of the prophetic promise, centuries had passed and still no Messiah had appeared. Could the Messiah perhaps already have been among them without their knowing it? Across those centuries there had been one who ordered the rebuilding of the Temple, others who drove pagans from it, and not a few powerful rulers. God’s chosen people might well have wondered whether the Messiah was to be found amongst them; yet, one after another, the course of history ruled out such possibilities.
By the first century BC, therefore, they might still have held firmly to the promises spoken by the prophets, whilst knowing inwardly that promises unfulfilled for centuries need not necessarily be fulfilled within the brief span of their own lives. The miracles of the prophets seemed no longer to be seen; neither was the power of a king such as those of old. God appeared to have remained silent for a very long time, almost absent from their own time and place. Faced now with the might of a great empire, was there still any hope for the restoration of Israel? Would a descendant of David ever return to his throne? If God had long since departed from them, did His promises still mean anything? In the midst of near-despair, was God still there? Would the promise ever be fulfilled?
And precisely when the promise itself was being doubted—when even God Himself was being called into question—the Son of God came into the world, quietly, in an obscure corner.
II. Hope Amid Doubt
The story of the Nativity will already be familiar to most readers and need not be repeated here. The sentiments described above may not correspond in every detail to the historical reality, but they are unlikely to have been very far removed from it. Even Jesus’s own disciples understood the Messiah in terms of a king who would restore the nation; how much more might this have been true of a people who, in the centuries between the Testaments, had experienced the destruction of their nation and the loss of their homes? The movement from God’s silence and Judah’s despair towards the discovery of hope within that despair may perhaps be glimpsed in Luke’s brief account of Simeon (Luke 2:25–34).
Simeon lived centuries after those earlier promises had been given. His hope was probably not his alone, but the hope shared by his family and community over successive generations. It is not difficult to imagine the many generations that had already passed, and the many ancestors who had lived out their entire lives without ever seeing the fulfilment of God’s promise. Perhaps Simeon had expected that he, like his forebears, would wait for the Messiah until his death and never see that hope fulfilled. Yet he became one of those who did see the Messiah. Within his own lifetime, he was permitted to behold the hope for which his family, his community, and his people had waited through the generations.
Seen in this light, although Simeon asked God to let him ‘depart in peace’, he need not necessarily have been an old man. He had seen the Messiah with his own eyes whilst still alive; he had held the holy infant in his arms; he had personally witnessed the fulfilment of God’s promise. To see fulfilled the hope given by God to one’s family, one’s people, and one’s nation—a hope carried across generations—must have brought a satisfaction beyond description: the fulfilment of the hope of a lifetime.
If so, it is not difficult to understand why the sight of the infant Messiah could move Simeon to say:
Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.
III. Awakening the World in an Imperfect World
Seen in this way, the meaning of Christmas lies in the fulfilment of a promise when hope appears faint, and in the discovery that a long season of waiting has not, in the end, been in vain. Christians today live with a similar hope for the coming of the kingdom of God. For two thousand years, generations of believers before us have persevered throughout their lives in hope of the Lord’s return, yet they did not, within their brief earthly lives, see that promise fulfilled. Christmas reminds us that the Messiah’s first coming was fulfilled when hope had almost given way to despair. It therefore enables us, whatever our circumstances, to continue holding fast to the hope of the Messiah’s return.
The meaning of Christmas, then, must be grounded in waiting for hope to be fulfilled. Such waiting must pass through the struggles of faith and through the cry that questions God in the midst of doubt. To pass through a time in which God is silent is itself a testing and refining of perseverance and faith. When Christians today look upon the sick, the poor, and the oppressed, they too may ask: Does God see?
God ought not to be understood merely as the God of the individual, but also as the God of the world—the God who is objectively and necessarily involved in the world and sovereign over it. Yet God may appear absent from the stage of history. He may seem absent from the truths we learnt in our youth; absent from the oppression suffered by the poor around us; absent even from acts of judgement carried out beneath the banner of justice. It is precisely then that this kind of hope is needed.
Yet when the church allows no room for believers to question God, demanding gratitude and gratitude alone, whence is hope to arise if one has never been allowed to pass through the silence of God? When believers encounter hardship, their struggles may be dismissed, without empathy, by the theological formula that ‘God is in control of everything’. For the believer who actually needs help, is this what it means to be ‘sound in faith’?
In our present circumstances, is there truly nothing but cause for thanksgiving and no occasion to ask God, ‘Why?’ Perhaps it is simply that the environment makes such questions difficult to share. Yet the church ought to be the community that understands better than any other that present reality cannot triumph over what is to come. For that very reason, it must by its nature remain dissatisfied with the present. Nor should gratitude become an attachment to the present that causes the church to forget the hope to which it ought to hold fast.
When the exuberant thanksgiving of the evangelistic rally has passed, we must move beyond a Gospel proclaimed merely for the sake of the church, and return to the Gospel that awakens the world and calls it to hold fast to hope.