If your Advent season has been anything like mine, it’s been absolutely dizzying—between darting about to various children’s activities, attending church functions, gift hunting, and succumbing to seasonal sicknesses.
And, if you follow world news, the effect is equally disorienting—from upheaval in Syria and persecution of Christians to unidentified drones hovering over the US East Coast and whispers of world war.
Amid this bewildering season, to tune out the world’s clamor and prepare our hearts to merrily receive our King seems a rather fanciful, naïve proposition. After all, to-do lists must be done. And when the quiet of Christmas subsides in January, we’ll be back to contending with the same turbulent earthly affairs as always. So, why engage in holiday escapism at all? When all is said and done, must we really take a break from our busyness and meditate upon something as mundane as a mother by a manger? Need we really calm our minds, clear our calendars, and dwell upon the same old nativity story?
The answer, you may have predicted, is yes.
However frenetic our families and surroundings may seem today, they aren’t more chaotic than the array of crises facing God’s people in the first century. They too contended with tyrannical rule, a teetering empire, and the weight of unmet prophetic expectations—to the point of controversy among religious scholars of the day concerning the nature of future events. Their experience, it turns out, may not have felt so different from ours.
All of this serves to show why Jesus received such a violent welcome upon his entrance on the scene. Rarely, after all, are newborns suspected by monarchs of high treason. Yet his mere birth prompted a holocaust of young boys at the hands of Herod—recapitulating the Pharaoh of the exodus—on account of which God’s people, typified by Rachel, wept and wailed for her children (Matthew 2:16-18). Angels attended to the boy’s arrival with kingly announcements and great, starry spectacles. Meanwhile, royal sages from foreign lands traveled from afar to render obeisance to the Christ child. Or, in the words of Gerard Moultrie, paraphrasing a fifth-century Syrian liturgy:
Rank on rank the host of heaven
spreads its vanguard on the way,
as the Light of light descendeth
from the realms of endless day,
that the pow’rs of hell may vanish
as the darkness clears away. (“Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence”, 1864)
In sum, our Lord’s incarnation was an act of war. It was a shot heard ’round the cosmos in the unseen battle between the people of God and the powers of darkness—a conflict which, though already won, still continues to wreak havoc among the nations and in individual lives.
This same battle, though decided at Calvary, is the reason we continue to send gospel laborers into the harvest today, rescuing the lost and unreached from the clutches of death and hell and making Christ known to them in all his glory, from the stable to the empty tomb.
Christmas is not a distraction from the present season but the solution to it. Thus, to succumb to the cacophony of worldly worries during the Advent season—as a sickly little one to a stuffy nose or crackling cough amid the cold of winter—is to miss the very climax and resolution of our own story. Far from mere escapism, to tune out the deep assurance offered by Christmas is to switch frequencies on one’s radio in the midst of battle, only to miss the voice of the victorious commander at the most crucial moment of the melee. Instead, let us again do what the above-cited hymn commends:
Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
and with fear and trembling stand;
ponder nothing earthly minded,
for, with blessing in his hand,
Christ our God to earth descendeth,
our full homage to demand.
