NP View: Seeking God's love on a lonely Christmas

An editorial published by my colleagues at the National Post on 25 December 2020.

With increasing parts of the country in lockdown, the official advice for Christmas gatherings is not to gather. It makes for a sobering Christmas this year.

Keep your distance, or someone might die. Stay apart to stay safe, or you might die.

That’s 2020 in summary. We learned so many new words this year — social distancing, respiratory aerosols, community spread, flattening the curve. This time last year, few people knew where Wuhan was. Now, it’s a household name.

So many words that used to give us comfort — gathering, getting together, assemblies, congregations, holidays — now make us anxious. Isolation — heretofore a word of dread — is now a desperate means of survival.

With increasing parts of the country in lockdown, the official advice for Christmas gatherings is not to gather. Don’t visit. Don’t go out. Remain at home. Isolate. Keep your distance or someone might die.

It makes for a sobering Christmas this year. Christians look toward what holy writ calls the Word made flesh, Emmanuel, God-with-us, Jesus. It’s not sentiment, for the Christian tradition unsparingly looks upon this world as a “vale of tears.”

Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus. Why would God want to come and be part of the year of our Lord 2020? Or more broadly, why would God want to be part of this vale of tears at all?

For that is what Christians celebrate: that God becomes man in that baby born in Bethlehem. As Luther’s catechism puts it: “Jesus Christ, true God, begotten of the Father from eternity, and also true man, born of the virgin Mary, is my Lord.”

Christianity is different than other world religions. Moses and Muhammad point out a way that man might draw close to God, who remains apart from his creation even as he guides it and cares for it. The great eastern religious traditions propose a path beyond this material world, where the vale of tears is no more.

Christians profess something rather different. Not that Jesus was inspired by God, or sent by God, or leads people to God — but that he is God. God comes to save his creation from within, as it were, as one like us, but still remaining God. The creator not only guides his creation, he unites himself to it and becomes part of it.

That is not the safe thing to do. Better to keep distant and avoid contact, because to enter this world means to become subject to sickness, suffering, danger and death.

Draw close, enter this world — and you will die. Christians believe that God does just that.

Continue reading at the National Post.