Friends: So many people ask, “What is the meaning of Christmas?” The Apostle Paul was maybe the first to figure out, “What is the meaning of Christ?” See the column below. May the heart of Christmas continue always.  Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #893

December 26, 2023

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

New Every Day

By Bob Walters

“He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant – not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” 2 Corinthians 3:6

Family scheduling has pushed our Christmas back a few days this year, but we’ll do the same old things in the same old way with a renewed spirit of surprise and love.

We’ll just do them this coming Saturday: Merry Christmas Day, plus five.

Funny how Christmas is largely the same every year yet new every year.  With minor adjustments I’ve put up the same basic outdoor Christmas display for 10 years.  Ditto wife Pam on the inside.  We will end 2023, stow the Christmas gear, go into the new year with hope and promise, and see what new mercies and surprises God has for us in 2024.  Some things get old; some never do. Jesus is like that for many of us.

I am currently about 300 pages into N.T. “Tom” Wright’s 2018 biography of the Apostle Paul.  And I guess you could say – thanks to Wright’s scriptural depth and Pauline expertise – I have a newfound appreciation for the “newness” of Christ. Among the earliest disciples and saints, Paul more than anyone truly “got” the fact that Jesus was something entirely new, yet, also, as old as the Garden and as eternal as God.

We celebrate Christmas as the arrival of God into humanity in the human form of Jesus, born in Bethlehem to the virgin Mary from the seed of the Holy Spirit into the tribe of Judah.  That was something really new.  So new, in fact, few – including Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the Wise Men, and later the prophet John the Baptist, all of whom had been informed by angels proclaiming Jesus as Son of God, the Messiah promised to the Jews, and the savior of the whole world – could disconnect Jesus’s newness from their errant assumptions the Law of Israel, i.e., the Old Covenant …

… And then accurately reconnect Jesus to what Hebrew prophets had been saying for hundreds of years. Jesus wasn’t here just to save the Jews; Jesus was here to save everybody.  In fact, the New Covenant in Jesus would restore all of creation to God’s original purpose: the expression of His love, and revelation of His glory.

What was new about Jesus, as Paul’s quoted scripture above reminds, is that for various reasons “the letter kills,” i.e., the Law brings death.  How? The Law points out Israel’s failures and invites unloving comparisons and competitions.  The Law was meant only for the Jews: to identify them as God’s chosen people.  But they were chosen to reveal God – the One, Almighty, Creator God – in a pagan world full of man-made idols and cultural gods.  Jesus embodied the whole new mission and gift: eternal life through restored relationship with God through faith in Jesus, brought by the Spirit.

See? “The Spirit gives life.” God was always good.  God was always the giver of life.  God was always love.  God was always the Creator.  Those realities are as old as humanity.  After the fall in the Garden, humanity stumbled around in sin for thousands of years until God initiated His eternal plan of salvation by introducing Christ.

That’s what Jesus was saying throughout the Gospels; that’s what Paul was first to truly identify and expound.  And it is our ministry today.  The world will be new again when Jesus returns.  But Christmas is when we know God came to gather us all back. 

It’s not just an old story; it is truth that remains new every day.  Merry Christmas.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) and wife Pam spent Christmas in northern Michigan.