This and That from Pastor Tim

Pastor Article, MennoNotes , December 2009:

It is likely that during Jesus’ lifetime, there was no “real meaning of Christmas” in people’s minds at all. In fact, it is unlikely that thoughts about how Jesus was born even entered people’s minds, until Matthew and Luke wrote their Gospels. There’s certainly no record that Jesus himself made a big deal of it. 

So I found myself wondering what people thought when, for the first time, perhaps forty to sixty years after the events in Bethlehem, they had placed before them the Bethlehem story. What did it have to do with their lives? What, for them, was the “real meaning” (or at least the “original meaning”) of Christmas? 

We know it wasn’t carols, or lights, or reindeer, or gifts, or shopping days, or sales, or decorated trees. That we know for sure. 

We also know that the first ones to hear the Gospel writers’ accounts of Jesus’ birth lived in a world of low life expectancy, multiple and mysterious religious options, and all of this under the thumb of a faraway emperor in Rome. It was a difficult and uncertain life. 

And so we ask: Read through those eyes, in that particular context, what might it have meant to ponder the circumstances of Jesus’ birth? I think what might have been noticed follows: 
 

• Peasants and nobodies have great importance. 
• The Kingdom of Heaven isn’t about earthly kings. 
   
• God hasn’t forgotten people. 
• God is personal, present, and knowable. 
   
• The old, old storyline of salvation and promise hasn’t fizzled. Through Jesus it is still alive. 
   
• The seemingly all-powerful empire is only a minor player on the world stage of God’s great drama of redemption. 
   
• Life isn’t easy, but salvation and light are penetrating every dark corner of this world. 

It seems to me that those were among the “real meanings of Christmas” as it was first written. It also seems to me that those still ring true today.           

Pastor Tim Schrag