Prepare

As we prepare to celebrate Jesus’ birth and anticipate his return in glory, it might be fair to ask what difference his coming has made in the world. Positively, his coming has offered salvation,
hope, and peace to all people. His life and teachings offer an example of faithful living for us to emulate. His call to discipleship gives us purpose for living – a vocation that permeates our daily
work and play. His coming among us affirms God’s great love for us all, and his death and resurrection offer to us not only forgiveness for our sins but also hope for eternal life that
buoys our living day-to-day. Following him, churches and individuals have reached out to feed the hungry and work for justice for the oppressed; they have welcomed strangers and healed
the sick; they have created housing for the unhoused and shown compassion to those at the margins of society who thought they had been forgotten. Jesus’ coming has changed the world
for the better in more ways than we count – and that is worth celebrating! But his coming among us has also had less positive results. It has led to persecution, not just of his followers, but also by his self-proclaimed followers – in the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, and the brutal treatment of Native Americans and African-American slaves in our own nation. It has spawned conflict among Christian siblings who disagree on what Jesus would have us do and are willing to fight to prove their point. We have seen supposed followers of Jesus bomb Planned Parenthood offices, support racist policies, attack queer neighbors, persecute Jews, and impose their own interpretation of the faith in some of the most unloving, violent, and oppressive terms imaginable. We might dismiss those events as the misguided interpretations of a minority of believers, but there have been enough of those actions across the years to make one wonder how many people have suffered as a direct result of Jesus’ coming. Herod’s slaughter of the innocents shortly after Jesus’ birth – an act that forced the holy family to flee to Egypt as refugees – was the first in two thousand years’ worth of suffering related to Jesus’ coming. The historical record is thus a bit mixed. Why then do we celebrate his birth with such great joy? We do so because we believe that his coming is good news for the world in the midst of a lot of bad news, some of it done in the name of Christ but not in obedience to him. As his disciples, we proclaim that his message is fundamentally about God’s love for the world – for the whole world – and God’s hope-filled promise of peace on earth and eternal life beyond this earthly existence. We who celebrate his coming should not linger too long at the manger, basking in the glow of that Silent Night. We should head out to share his good news as the shepherds did, to work for justice as the wise men did in defying Herod, to follow his example and live as he calls us to live – with love for all our neighbors, and to oppose the corruption of the gospel by those who use it in violent, divisive, hateful, unloving ways. In other words, we should show the world that Jesus’ coming really is good news for the world – and good news for us!