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Life, the Universe and Everything
By BANKS.J BABY
01 December 2007
Christmas time is here again. The lights have been up in Oxford since the end of October. All the shops are reminding us of the importance of shopping. At Christmas, Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus. But why do they care so much about one baby boy born so long ago?
Near the beginning of his biography of Jesus, Matthew tells us ` “ they will call him Immanuel” - which means, “God with us” (Matt 1v23). At Christmas we remember the day our creator came to live with his creation. We do not have a distant god, who made the world and is now disconnected from it. Instead we have a god who cares enough to humble himself and live with us.
This means we can know what God is like. We are not left to speculate, which is a good thing since we could never guess correctly, or know if by chance we did. But Paul writes of Jesus ‘He is the image of the invisible God’ (Col 1v15). In Jesus we see the God who we otherwise cannot know.
This also means God knows what it is to be human. He understands what it is to live here on Earth. In being born as a human, Jesus identified with us. The writer of Hebrews says ‘Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers’ (Heb 2v11). Jesus became one of us. Hebrews continues ‘he had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God…Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted’ (Heb 2v17-18) and ‘we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are - yet was without sin’ (Heb 4v15). We can take our problems to him, because he has met them before.
But more importantly, he has solved our biggest problem. Ultimately we do not celebrate at Christmas because of a birth, but because of a death. Hebrews 2v17 continues ‘…and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people’. Identifying with us by being born among us enabled Jesus to die in our place: ‘Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death - that is the devil - and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.
The death of death - that’s certainly something worth celebrating! Merry Christmas!