In the movie Talladega Nights (this is not a recommendation!), comedian Will Ferrell plays a southern American race car driver who, early in the film, says an interesting grace at a family meal. He addresses his prayer—repeatedly—to “Dear Lord Baby Jesus,” and when his wife and father-in-law both push back against this habit, he insists that since he’s the one praying he can address Jesus however he likes, and that “I like Christmas Jesus best.” It’s an amusing picture of the habit many followers of Jesus have of imagining Jesus however we want him to be.
It's also a glimpse of the temptation to sentimentalize the Christmas story.
Christmas can easily become sweet and cute, a little like a baby. This is the holiday that we most want to feel like a warm drink on a cold day. We have built some of these sentimental habits into the words of our Christmas carols, including some of our favourites. Parents of infants have probably struggled with resentment as they sang the line, “the little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes,” from “Away in a Manger.” Even the image of the “Silent Night” on which Jesus was born seems a bit detached from the realities of a world on the move because the Roman empire was conducting a census.
But the treasury of Christmas carols contains many lyrics that recognize another reality. These songs, in crisp turns of phrase, remind us that the world we live in is often harsh and challenging to navigate. Even though we experience many good gifts in life, we also see a persistent undercurrent of trouble. We try to hide from it, or shield our eyes from it, but it remains. Sometimes it’s trouble within ourselves. Sometimes it’s between ourselves and others. Sometimes it’s in the world around us.
The “sin and sorrow” we sing about in “Joy to the World” as well as the blessing that “flow far as the curse is found” name this troubling reality. When we sing about Jesus being “risen with healing in his wings” in “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” there too we point to the fact that we need, at the most fundamental level, to be healed. And “O Little Town of Bethlehem” has for generations helped people to spot “the hopes and fears of all the years” as they play out in their own lives.
I’ve been reflecting this week about a few lines from another carol, “O Holy Night,” which run as follows:
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
Till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope—the weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.
The weary world rejoices. That’s one way of conceiving the meaning of Christmas. The persistent undercurrent of trouble makes us weary. We are weary of life’s busy pace, which presses itself home to us with vigour every December. We are weary of the conflicts in both our personal lives and the world we live in. (A Ukrainian pastor I know shared a photo on social media this morning, as he does every day, with the number of days Ukraine has been suffering in this current conflict: today was day 1035.) We are weary of the unwelcome surprises, whether they come as medical reports or sad phone calls, job changes or news of broken marriages. The word “weary” is appropriate because it expresses our helplessness. There are things in life that, no matter how we try, we just aren’t able to control or overcome.
Christmas is a day when we celebrate that someone else has overcome the world-weariness we all experience but can never quite gain the victory over. At the birth of Jesus, the angels proclaimed that good tidings of great joy had come for all the people. That announcement reflects the great central truth of the world. Something has happened that has changed our situation. That’s what those lines in “O Holy Night” are pointing to: the weary world rejoices because “a new and glorious morn” has dawned in Jesus’ coming. Over the past number of weeks in church we’ve been listening to the words of Old Testament prophets who longed for a day when this new and glorious morn would arrive. Jesus’ birth is that arrival.
In Isaiah 11, the greatest of all those forward-looking, longing-for-a-better day prophets delivered a message of hope for the fallen people of Israel. Though their life had turned out to resemble a fallen tree (do we sometimes feel that way?), a shoot that was full of life was going to spring out of the stump that was their lived experience. And this shoot would create a revolution in humanity and beyond.
This shoot would be a person full of the Spirit of God: “the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the LORD (11:2). The Jesus born at Christmas is also the man Jesus whose character in every way was a reflection of God his Father. When we look at Jesus, we see the perfect image of the God who made us and loves us.
This shoot that Isaiah looked for would be a person who refused to “judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears” (11:3). Too often we only have vision to see the immediate situation we’re in. We lose hope because we can’t see a way out. Jesus could see the depth of our problem better than we did, but he saw and made the way out, as he humbled himself to share our life as a human being and to give himself up to death on a cross for our sin.
This shoot that Isaiah looked for would wear righteousness and faithfulness like clothing (11:5). Righteousness and faithfulness in the Bible signify both a truthful character and the power to keep promises and overcome evil. After Jesus’ crucifixion he was raised back to life again in a powerful victory over death that still reverberates in our world today. The hope that came into the world not only at Christmas but also on Easter morning is renewed today in every person who turns to Jesus and finds themselves beginning to be remade into a new kind of person.
Finally, this shoot that Isaiah looked for would be a person whose accomplishments (birth, death, resurrection) would transform the world. It isn’t all visible yet, but a day is coming when the old hostilities are overcome. Isaiah envisions it this way: “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them… They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (11:6, 9). Sometimes even now, in the midst of dark times, we see little hints of change that give us a glimpse of what it is that we hope for in Jesus. We are hoping for God’s reconciliation to take root in the whole wide world.
This is what Christmas means. In the birth of the child whose coming we celebrate tonight, we see the sprouting of Isaiah’s shoot. In the angels’ rejoicing is his ultimate end: “on earth peace to those on whom his favour rests.” In the gifts of the magi we are pointed to the majestic power required to bring about this peace.
The story would await its completion by the whole life of Jesus, including his death on the cross, but his coming at Christmas was the beginning of it all.
The weary world rejoices.
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