News & Comment

‘Our God contracted to a span,
Incomprehensibly made man.’

Charles Wesley’s famous couplet expresses the wonder of Christmas with typical precision. He gets to the theological heart of what the manger, the wise men, the shepherds and angels are all about.

And that’s what is missing from most people’s understanding of Christmas today. For many, Christianity has shrunk to a folk religion. They like the vague ‘spirituality’ of carols by candlelight but haven’t a clue about the wonder of the incarnation.

In many cases even that limited spirituality has all but gone. Christmas for the majority is Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas?, Rudolph, ho-ho-ho, baubles on the tree, Walking in a Winter Wonderland, too much sherry, When Santa Got Stuck Up The Chimney, tense family get-togethers and credit-card debt.

Perhaps sometimes we need to strip all that away in order to discover the real Christmas story told in the Gospels. But even with that story we need to tread carefully. Christmas-card nativity imagery tends to be twee and unreal, with lots of gold trimming and glitter-powder. There was no holy glow round Joseph, Mary and the Christ-child. The reality was much more earthy: a young couple away from home, tiredness and frustration, the urgent need to find a birthing-place, the newborn in a manger for lack of a cradle.

In Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form Colossians 2:9

As Christians we believe something phenomenal was taking place there among that earthiness. God himself, the maker and sustainer of the universe, had entered human society in the form of that tiny baby. And Jesus’ arrival was the beginning of everything good. As he grew to manhood, lived without sin, died on the cross, rose again and ascended to the Father, he would bring within reach forgiveness for sins, power for living, and the prospect of life beyond death.

Yes, that little incident in a forgotten corner of the Middle East two thousand years ago was the biggest thing that ever happened! Let the wonder of it put a smile on your face this Christmas.