At a recent Christmas Eve service I was attending in a prestigious church, the minister climbed into the high pulpit and began her sermon, “The little baby Jesus...”
Not just Jesus. Not baby Jesus. But the little baby Jesus. Okay, okay. Cute. I can give that a pass. We all have our ways that we like to imagine Jesus. I mean, if I had it my way, I’d like picture Jesus in a tuxedo t-shirt. ‘Cuz it says like, “I want to be formal, but I’m here to party too.” I mean, who am I to judge?
Yet this minister was channeling some serious Ricky Bobby from Talladega Nights because she could not stop going on about sweet 8 pounds, 6-ounce newborn infant Christmas Jesus. By the end of the sermon she was just going around the sanctuary pointing to random people, and saying, “The little baby Jesus is for you, and you, and you….the little baby Jesus is for all of you!”
If we're fair though, this awkward sermon was really only our wish list of Christmas cliches taken to their absurd end. She was giving the people what she thought they wanted.
So it begs to ask, why do we have a tendency to approach the birth of Jesus so sentimentally? One reason is in part to the Advent set up itself.
The themes of peace, joy, hope and purity can get really cheesy really quickly if we’re not careful. Another reason I suspect is that we are tempted to woo people outside the Church with the cuteness factor of the newborn infant Christmas Jesus. Why not spend a month avoiding the bloody dying Jesus so we can coo at the little baby Jesus in golden fleece diapers sitting in decoratively arranged feeding trough next to a five-year-old Mary from the kindergarten class.
People eat that stuff up, right?
And I mean no offense to children’s Christmas pageants, but cute kids dressed up as Mary and Joseph does not a gospel message make. If, in the death and resurrection of Jesus, God declared victory over sin and death, then Jesus’ birth was God storming the beaches of the enemy.
This is not just little baby Jesus being born. This is war.
Long before, our primordial ancestors had declared a rebellion against God. This rebellion infected all of humanity with sin and evil. In response, for the thousands of years before the birth of Christ, God waged skirmishes against sin and evil through his chosen people.
God began first with a single elderly recruit named Abraham and eventually expanded to the entire Jewish nation. Still, like the overwhelming force of a liberating power approaching a collapsing totalitarian regime, these skirmishes were actually mercifully reserved. God was not bringing is full power to bear. They were meant to send a message, like dropping leaflets into enemy territory.
The message was this: Your liberator, your true king, is coming. Surrender your sin. Give up your rebellion. The dictatorship of the prince of demons will come to an end.
For thousands of years, God used the Jewish people as a communal leaflet to the fallen world. But now, the leaflets have been dropped. The skirmishes have demonstrated the irresistible power and glory of God. At Christmas, the tide is about to turn. The invasion begins now.
And if we were making this up, if this was a fable that reflected our anthropomorphic fantasies, the invasion would have looked a lot more liked typical human expectations and typical human agendas. A brave general would have been selected by God to lead a physical army against evil nations.
This was, in fact, the expectation of many Jewish religious leaders at the time. Their concept of a coming King, to rule in the legacy of the Davidic royal line, was a King that was supposed to be both a warrior and a ruler; a general and a politician.
Their mistake though, was not in being too literal, but in being too provincial. The evil that God intends to defeat is not simply political. As we have so often witnessed here and abroad, political regime change, despite all the promises, often changes very little. God’s war is not with nations, but within individual hearts within each and every nation.
So perhaps a more heavenly army then? Legions of angels lead by the Lord of Hosts, descending upon the world to strategically remove every evil person in this world, carefully sparing every good person. There were apocalyptic groups in Jesus’ day that hoped that the coming King might do something similar.
Except the evil God intends to defeat is not measured by who has done more good deeds than bad deeds, or who is better than 50% of the general population. God is here to destroy all evil and the very source of it. If an army of angels were to destroy every evil person on this planet, not a single person reading this would be left alive. Every one of us participates directly and indirectly in evil because sin is not something outside of us, but rather a condition of brokenness within us.
So this invasion, this liberation from what the author the Epistle to the Hebrews called a “lifelong slavery over the fear of death,” is entirely counterintuitive – though the Jewish prophets had been warning us as much in books such as Isaiah.
God comes not with an army of men, or even an army of angels, but in the most seemingly powerless force imaginable. A tiny, helpless infant born to a teenage peasant in a backwater town in the remote corner of an empire. Roman Caesars send legions. American presidents send drones. But God sends Godself in abject humility and weakness to defeat the forces of sin and death.
Within that little baby Jesus is the ultimate King who will not kill his enemies, but die for them instead. For in dying for them, he will make it possible for them to be saved, redeemed and freed from the oppression of their own sin nature. This is not a provincial human agenda. This is nothing short of a cosmic revolution.
Nobel-peace prizewinner Bishop Desmond Tutu said that true revolution happens when, “The oppressed are freed from being oppressed and the oppressors are freed from being oppressors.” God, in the incarnated Son, will win the most glorious of all victories. God does so not in destroying the rebels for treason, but in restoring them as loyal citizens of his Kingdom.
Now, some of us may have heard something like this. But if we have, we often hear it in way wholly disconnected from ourselves. We marvel at how Jesus could die for the enemies that beat him, mocked him and executed him. Isn’t it amazing that God’s liberation involves rescuing such enemies? Yet here’s what we often forget: I am that enemy.
The government soldiers and religious elites didn’t put Jesus on the cross. Jesus says in the Gospel of Luke that no one takes his life. He lays it down. Yet why does it he lay it down? Because of my sin. Because of my wickedness. I am that rebel. I am the enemy that Jesus died for that I might be forgiven, and so as the author of Hebrews also says, that I could be “made into a son or daughter of glory.”
Yes, the little baby Jesus is for you, but probably not in the way that you think. The little baby Jesus, the mystery of God as man, is born for the purpose of dying that we might be born again and live. In his resurrection, the power of sin and death is broken forever.
Christmas means war. Christmas means rescue. Let’s not just talk about a little baby Jesus. Instead, like the pagan astrologers from Persia who followed the star to Christ, bow before King Jesus. Give worship to King Jesus. And give thanks to God.
