December 22, 1999
EDITORIAL:
Let Christmas surprise you this year
___Give yourself a gift this week: Seek solitude and spend a few moments contemplating the stupendous surprise of that first Christmas.
___Don't bother polishing your thoughts into picture-perfect images. No Neiman-Marcus mahogany manger. No Waterford crystal star. No Mary, Joseph, Babe and shepherd models hired from the William Morris Agency. And no stable designed by Ralph Lauren for a photo spread in the December issue of Southern Living.
___Try for realism. If you've ever visited a barn, recall the smells--of hay, to be sure, but also dust, grain and barnyard animals. Especially barnyard animals. If you've ever seen the faces of a teenage mother and a tired and worried father, remember them as Mary and Joseph. If you've ever been by the employment agency on a cold December morning and looked at the men standing in line to get a shot at a job doing back-breaking work for killing wages, imagine them as the shepherds.
___Helped along by advertisers and made-for-TV specials, we've become pretty adept at reinventing Christmas. That's not so bad when it comes to creating warm-fuzzy feelings about the holidays. It probably makes us act a little cheerier at the shop, office, school or neighborhood party. It causes the cash registers to ring like a truckload of xylophones bouncing over railroad tracks. Maybe it even prompts us to put a little something extra in the Salvation Army bucket.
___Unfortunately, it doesn't do much to move us to the true spirit of Christmas. To grasp that feeling, we must contemplate outrageous audacity. We've got to jump in surprise and feel the tingle that runs down our spines when we're shocked out of our shoes. Because God's ways aren't always our ways.
___Try to imagine what you would do if you were God and you intended to save the world. Chances are, you wouldn't come as a baby, born to a young girl under circumstances that set the village gossips' tongues wagging. You wouldn't trust your young future to a common laborer from a has-been family. You wouldn't make your mama ride a donkey on her due date. You wouldn't decide to be born in a barn. And you wouldn't send your only birth announcement to a bunch of dirty animal tenders who rank slightly above pond scum on the social register. Because God's ways aren't our ways.
___That's why it's so important to go someplace quiet and try to imagine what it must have been like to be a shepherd on that natal night. Or to be Mary or Joseph.
___The closest we come to God's ways is when we surprise others with outlandish, unexpected generosity. In that Bethlehem stable, God defied all human calculation. That wouldn't be so important if it were only a Christmas surprise. But God has been busy surprising us with holy grace ever since. God chose an unfathomable method for leaving heaven to save people on Earth. Throughout that Baby's life, Jesus kept on surprising everyone he encountered. His mother and brothers, who thought he should come home and act like regular folks. His followers, who thought they'd eventually be generals in his army. Religious bureaucrats, who couldn't understand why he had such a hard time with them making up rules and making a buck in the Temple. Prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers, cripples and grieving mothers, who never before had been touched by true love. And even women who stuck by his side to what they thought was the bitter end, only to discover it was only the beginning. Surprise again.
___Their surprise is ours as well. No matter how hard we try, we can't rationalize why we deserve for God to take on the vulnerability of the baby of a poor Jewish family in occupied Palestine. We can't understand how God would let that only Son slip from heaven's security down to cruel Earth, where nice people often finish last. We can't conceive of the love that would let both of them feel the hellish agony our sin created in this place.
___Humanly speaking, nobody deserves Christmas. Jesus didn't deserve the crudest welcome our world had to offer. We don't deserve the love that sent him here; never have, never will. Fortunately, God's ways are not our ways. And fortunately, God's I-love-you gift of a Baby in a Bethlehem barn was the best surprise of all eternity.
___May Jesus surprise you again this Christmas.
––Marv Knox
E-mail the editor at marvknox@baptiststandard.com
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