Monday, December 24, 2018
632 - Comfort and Joy
Spirituality Column #632
December 25, 2018
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
Comfort and Joy
By Bob Walters
I can’t think of a better way to ruin Christmas than to go
off on a “linguistics police” tangent regarding subjective, objective,
transitive, punctuation, and “pseudo-archaism” lyrical and literary analysis of
a very old and wonderful Christmas carol.
So we won’t;
the joy would be lost amid the legalisms (as it usually is).
Just let me say that my favorite libretto of all the classic seasonal
songs describing the great human profit of our savior’s birth – among all the “Harks,”
“Angels,” “Glorias,” “Holy Nights,” and the rest – is the direct, theologically
spot-on message that resides in the first verse from the 17th
century’s God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen:
“For Christ the Lord our Savior
Is born this Christmas Day,
To save us all from Satan’s pow’r
When we were gone astray.”
If anything
should be clear to us at Christmas it is that Jesus arrived amid humanity as
God on earth not to punish anyone or to collect a debt from anyone. He came bearing the righteousness of God and
the gifts of forgiveness, salvation, faith, hope, love, and eternal life. Jesus came to save us from Satan’s awful
power – the earthly lord’s spirit-killing and faith-crippling temptations that exploit
weak humanity’s great Godly gift of freedom – not to present us with God’s bill
for services rendered.
Now, I’ve
read Revelation and I do believe that
day is coming – Judgement Day, et al, and it won’t be pretty – but Christmas
isn’t it. My point here is to consider
how often we as church-going Christians hear the message of Christ framed as a frightful,
sin-dominated negative message of death, payment, guilt, and fear, rather than
the hopeful, positive, plainly-stated scriptural palette of life, grace, forgiveness,
and peace.
“You better watch out, you better not cry!”
rather than “God so loved the world.”
The threat of
being left out of Santa’s gift-fest supposedly encourages kids to behave, but
that is a temporary, earthly control mechanism that certainly doesn’t reflect
the eternal message of Jesus. I never
equated my love as a parent as a give-and-take with my two sons’ prospects on
Christmas morning. God doesn’t do that
with us, either. And I take notice when
I hear those types of threats any time in Christian preaching.
Christmas
should be a time of rejoicing, most properly I believe, because it is the revelation
of a “way out”: of God’s willingness to “go easy on us” if we will build a
faithful and trusting relationship of love with His Son, and if we will love
other people, especially our enemies. We
as sinners are God’s enemies, but Jesus “fixes” that with His love.
Luke 6:37 contains the very
familiar sentiment about “don’t judge or condemn others” so you won’t be, and “forgive others” so you will be. That is us
going easy on each other, and God’s promise – revealed in Jesus – that He’ll go
easy on us.
Merry Christmas! What possibly could provide more comfort and
joy?
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) studied and is pretty sure the “God Rest
You…” title means something closer to “Be at peace, gentlemen,” not “Relax, you
party animals.”
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