Monday, December 24, 2018

Glad Tidings of Great Joy

It is amazing that Christmas often turns into a moralistic affair. What I mean is that Christians often don't really receive it! We are inspired by it. We are motivated by it. We try hard to do good because of it, volunteering at this or that charity, giving, feeling, hoping that humanity will be inspired to be better because of it. But who really merely sits passively and receives it?

In the end, Christmas isn't about Jesus inspiring us to be our better selves, stirring in us the better angels of our nature. Christmas is about an act of the Triune God to send the second person of the Trinity into the world, robed in the frailty of humanity, divested of the privileges associated with His deity, in order to do one thing! He came on a mission that only He could fulfill. He came to die at our hands, for us, to redeem us, to be for us what we could not be! Jesus' mission was not to join us in some commune of equals, each taking up his place in some great moral cause for the improvement of humanity. Jesus does not save by leading. Jesus leads by saving.

Christian, please this Christmas take the right posture! You are not first to be inspired to do better next year because of Jesus. You are first to sit stupefied that the God of the universe would give you so extravagant a gift. Raise your empty beggarly hands to heaven and receive, for that is all you bring to this great day; this day that fractured open the universe at the entrance of the divine into the human world.

And what exactly is the gift that God has given you? In the great Triune counsel, the plan has always been that The Father would present before you His perfect Son. And the Son would add to himself a human nature so that in His great condescension and vulnerability He could be the human being in whom God could be well pleased. Note well that He is not pleased with any other human being! Jesus was righteous and good and kind and true and everything good that you are not! More than that God has declared that the goodness of this only good man He will give to you, as though it were your own, when you simply receive Him by faith. More than that The Father declared, and Jesus agreed, that Jesus would go to a miserable wooden cross to bear upon himself the punishments that you deserve for your many sins.

Where are you in this grand equation? You are a helpless, empty, shattered soul that gives precisely nothing to God. And yet He has not given you simply enough to raise yourself up and start to be good again. He has not supported you or come along side of you or given you therapy until you are strong again. He has made the dead person alive! He has already given you everything! He has made you whole, gloriously perfecting you in the foreign righteousness of the Incarnate Son! If you will set aside the foolish project of thinking that you can do it with His help and instead accept that He has done it for you, in spite of you, because you can do nothing, then everything the resplendent Son is will be counted as yours.

Glad tidings of great joy indeed!

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