Parish News Letter - Church News
So the turkey’s all gone, the last of the mince pies have been eaten, there are no presents left under the Christmas tree and it’s time to take down the decorations and cards. We’ve visited, or been visited by, the usual round of family and friends and the time has come to think about going back to work, and life returning to its normal routine. Christmas is over for another year and so we pack up the nativity sets and the stores take down their tinsel and the muzak returns to non-seasonal blandness in place of Christmas carols and endless repetition of Noddy Holder and Slade singing ‘Merry Christmas, Everybody’.
But the baby in the manger hasn’t gone away. We can’t keep Jesus locked in a time warp of the few days around his birth. God didn’t take on flesh just so that we could smile at another little fresh faced baby born in hardship to a young mother in a far off place.
Christmas marks the beginning of something radically new, something never seen before on earth. Christmas marks the point at which God became embodied, in-bodied, in human flesh. The miracle of Christmas is that God’s Son became like one of us. He suffered hardship; he knew pain and sorrow; he knew what it is to be frustrated, to be let down, to be put upon, to be taken for granted; he knew what it was like to strike his thumb with a hammer or to have toothache.
And why? Why should the creator of the universe subject himself to human limitations and weakness? Jesus said that he had come so that everyone who believes in him should have eternal life. Jesus didn’t just come to share in the trials and tribulations of everyday life. He came to show us how that human life can be lived in the power and fullness of everything that God had intended it to be in the first place. He didn’t come just to show us life, but to give us life, life in all of its fullness.
This baby, born in the humblest of circumstances, came to show us that true
fullness of life has got nothing to do with whether or not we have the latest
gadget or gismo; it has nothing to do with our status in the office or at the
school gate. Rather, fullness of life is to be found in living our life in
relationship with the God who gave us our life in the first place.
Jesus is for life, not just for Christmas. Yes, we can put the nativity set
back in the cupboard for another year. Yes, we can keep Jesus in the manger
and pretend that he was never anything other than a baby. But that would be
to miss the whole point of Christmas. That would be to have the greatest Christmas
present ever given, but to leave it unwrapped, to put it by for another year
when once more we can take it out, admire the wrapping paper but never get
to open it up to see what is inside.
How about making a New Year’s resolution this year to find out more about who Jesus really is and why he thought it worth his while becoming one of us? One way that you could do that might be by joining an Alpha course – there will be one running in Wadhurst starting late January. Why not join in? Ian Hughes