Utumishi Blog

A local pastor pointed out recently that while Kenyans love the Christmas holiday season, food, new clothes for the children, travelling home (or to the beach if you have the money), Christmas is not made much of in the church.  Most churches will make scant mention of it until the Sunday before and the next Sunday it’s quickly forgotten. For many the repertoire of Christmas carols doesn’t extend much beyond Joy to the World and O Come all Ye Faithful.   In fact fewer people go to church on Christmas day than any other time of year – the complete reverse of the UK. 

For us, the Kenyan pastor went onto say, the death of Christ is much more important than the birth of Christ.  And my initial gut reaction when he said that was – that’s great!  Isn’t that how it should be?  So Christmas Day church-goers in the UK have a sentimental attachment to the birth of Christ but want nothing to do with the death of Christ – the reason for which he came, the key to everything, the only hope for sinners, the epicentre of the glory of God.  Surely one of the great strengths of the African church is its unashamed lifting up of the Cross of Christ.

But then as I thought about it a bit more I started to see what the pastor was getting at.  There is real danger in ignoring the incarnation.  We lose a lot.  In fact the more you think about it the more you see how not making much of the birth of Jesus skews our whole view of the gospel and the Christian life. 

How?  What exactly would we lose if Jesus was beamed down as a fully grown man an hour or two before the crucifixion, did some amazing miracle to prove who he was, explained what he was about to do, got up on the Cross and suffered for our sins?

1. Personal – the fact that we have Jesus being born as a baby, being taken to Egypt, returning, going to the Temple as a twelve-year-old, walking around as an adult for three years interacting with all sorts of people, a ministry recorded for us in 4D, means that we can know Jesus as a person.  Here is not just a cog in a system, a name, a party in a transaction – here is the beautiful person of Jesus to follow, to love, to push on in knowing better and deeper.  The one major thing I learnt in 2011 was that the gospel is not a concept – it is a person called Jesus, receiving him, being united to him, rejoicing in him.
2. Pattern – the incarnation is the most extraordinary pattern for us – not in the sense that we should incarnate (we already are in the flesh) or that we can take the same leap the Son of God took from heaven to earth (we can’t) – but in the sense of our attitude. The God in the manger gives us something rather different to the New Year SMSs calling us to aspire to health, wealth and prosperity. As Philippians 2 says, we should have a manger mindset like the God who humbled himself to be a nobody, to take the towel and bowl and serve, serve, serve, day in day out for 30 odd years.
3. Practical – the incarnation, as Irenaeus and later Luther saw, makes everyday life just as sacred as ‘religious life’, everyday spaces just as sacred as the monastery or church building. Christmas gives us a practical Christianity, a Monday-Saturday Christianity, a Christianity of the home and workshop and road and mundane practical sweat-it-out obedience rather than just a ‘spiritual’ Sunday faith consisting only of singing, reading and praying.
4. Progressive – the birth of Jesus reminds us that we are dealing with a story, a narrative, a flow of events in history. Our salvation did not take place on the head of a pin. It was planned before the Creation, it was prepared for through thousands of years of history, Jesus was born, he lived, he died, he was buried, he rose, he was seen, he ascended, he poured out the Spirit, he’s coming back. That’s the gospel. It’s not an abstract system, it’s a story that we’ve been swept up into and which should shape all our thinking and feeling and acting.
5. Perfect righteousness – as he lived for thirty or more years he was fulfilling all righteousness on our behalf; he was weaving a glorious garment of love and obedience and faithfulness that one day he would give to me in exchange for my filthy rags. The anchor of my assurance and peace is the stupendous news that not only has Jesus completely paid for my sin, he has clothed me ‘in royal robes I don’t deserve’ to stand boldly before the King.
6. Perfect High Priest – Christmas means Jesus knows what it is to be a frustrated toddler, to have the hormones of a fifteen year old boy; he knows what it is to be to be completely exhausted, to be hungry and thirsty, to be tempted in every way we are. He is perfectly equipped not only to be the perfect sacrifice but to be our merciful, gentle, completely understanding high priest.

It’s striking that one of the earliest and most serious heresies in the church was the denial that Christ had come in the flesh – fully man. Let’s not forget Christmas too quickly this year…