You know how every Christmas movie you’ve ever watched ends wrapped up in a tidy red bow? The lost puppy finds his way home. The broken marriage is restored. The perfect gift is always given. Messy families are reunited. The world sings. I sometimes cry.
Ever wonder why life isn’t like this? Even though you try. You hope. You forgive. You might even pray. Your cat doesn’t return. Your marriage leaves you heartbroken. Your messy family unravels more every time you meet. Death, disease, war, and injustice continue to spread.
The first Christmas is often portrayed just like the Christmas movies we watch. Perfect.
It was nothing of the sort.
The first Christmas is dangerous and risky and lonely. A young woman engaged to be married who finds herself pregnant without ever having sex. Trust me – that wouldn’t have been well received or believed even 2,000 years ago. Imagine her fear. A young man who doesn’t know what to do about it and plans to just end the engagement quietly but has a dream that his girl is telling the truth. And he stays. What a way to start a relationship.
This young couple is forced by the government of the day to travel while she is very pregnant to a place far from her own family support and community. Remember, this was before cars – sound like fun? Think again. The baby is born while the family is staying in an animal shelter beside a house, and by the time the baby is three months old they have to run for their lives. The family spends three years as refugees seeking asylum.
The baby born in these circumstances is Yeshua. In English we call Him Jesus. His birth is the reason we have celebrated Christmas for the last 2,000 years.
Because on that day God entered the world in human form to meet us exactly where we are.
Actually lived into messy human relationships, corrupt government, broken communities, and dysfunctional family. Got a taste of it all.
The question that gets me is why? Why would He do it? It would ultimately take His life. As this little baby grew and walked around with normal people like you and I, the stories tell us that God loves us and is moved with compassion. God weeps. Cries. Is gutted by the reality of our pain and hurt and fear and frantic searching for something to fix it. The whole story tells us God would risk it all to be with us.
Sit on that for a minute. I don’t know how your life movie is playing right now but this is good news to most of us. He lived in the broken messy realities of this life so that we can know He is with us in ours. We don’t have to sanitize the realities of our broken lives and world. God cries with us! God is for us! God is now with us!
He brings light right smack dab in the middle of our darkness. What if it’s true?
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Melanie Koch Nichol is the youth centre director at Youth Unlimited YFC North Perth.
