A Season of Ghosts: Christmas, Nostalgia, & “The Weight of Glory”

In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the first spirit to visit Ebenezer Scrooge is the ghost of Christmas past. Scrooge notes the spirit’s small stature and asks, “Long Past?” “No. Your past,” the ghost replies.

Dickens is on to something here because this spirit often visits us at this time of year. The season of Advent, by its nature, implies a forward trajectory. It celebrates humanity’s long wait for the arrival of the promised seed of Abraham. In reality, we seem to spend most of it looking back. Ostensibly, we are looking back to the first Advent by recalling the details of the Christmas story. But more often, as Scrooge’s ghost observes, it is our own past that is the real focus of attention.

If you doubt this, look at the ornaments on your Christmas tree. If yours is like most people’s, it is a little like an archeologist’s dig. Your family history hangs in layers before your eyes, with ornaments that commemorate special events or have particular meaning for you. There are the ones with pictures of your children in elementary school and the threadbare elves who no longer have their arms but used to hang on your mother’s tree. Our ornaments trace the fads and passing tastes that have gripped us down through the years. Places we have visited, hobbies we attempted, tastes we acquired and then abandoned. For many of us, Christmas isn’t just a celebration of the past. It is, at least as far as the tree is concerned, a celebration of our past.

But there is more to it than this. When Scrooge asked what business brought the spirit to his bedside, the ghost answered that it was his welfare. “Scrooge expressed himself much obliged, but could not help thinking that a night of unbroken rest would have been more conducive to that end,” Dickens writes. “The Spirit must have heard him thinking for it said immediately: ‘Your reclamation, then. Take heed!”[1]

Here, too, I think that Dickens is on to something. But the trajectory of our own stories moves in the opposite direction. The aim of the spirits in Dickens’ tale is to save Scrooge from his past. Our goal is to reproduce it. There is nothing inherently wrong with this other than its futility. The world that nostalgia longs to generate is one that is self-constructed. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as reconstructed.

In his essay “The Weight of Glory,” C. S. Lewis characterizes nostalgia as “the inconsolable secret” in each one of us.[2] He describes it as a longing “for something that has never actually appeared in our experience.”[3] If he is correct, then the nostalgia of Christmas is not the desire to reproduce the Christmases of the past so much as it is a longing to experience Christmas as it should have been.

Not only does this explain why the actual holiday so often disappoints us, despite our furious preparation and our genuine anticipation. But it also clarifies why we return to it each year with an optimism that a more objective observer would probably call naive. The conviction that drove old Marley, though “dead as a door-nail,” to haunt Scrooge was the hope that his appeal would procure his former partner a better future. But we expect the ghost of Christmases past to heal the present.

Whatever dysfunction has dogged our heels in the past, somehow, each time we reenact the passion play that is Christmas, we expect things to go differently. We think that people who have been at odds all year long and often for decades will endure one another’s presence with grace and even pleasure. That sibling who never calls and never visits will show up on our doorstep smiling, and with arms full of packages. The seat at the table that has long been empty will no longer prick our hearts. The drunk will miraculously arrive sober. The prodigal will come home and not in rags. We will be a “normal” family, if only for a brief time.

It matters very little that the Christmas Spirits’ many brothers were unable to fulfill this expectation for us. Our hope in Christmas’s power to recast the past and somehow heal our present seems to be born each year anew. There is a kind of sad beauty in this fact. But there is a danger also. It is that we will fall into a kind of idolatry. Lewis captures its essence in his critique of nostalgia–or rather his critique of the longing the word so often represents. “The books or music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing,” he writes. “These things–the beauty, the memory of our own past–are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers.”

And yet we are not wrong to expect Christmas to reclaim our past and redeem the present. We are only mistaken about the timing. This annual cycle of longing leading to expectations that are never quite met is very much in the spirit of Advent. It is a kind of living plainsong that forcibly reminds us that we are still waiting for Emmanuel, who having come once to redeem, “will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him” (Heb. 9:28).

When that day comes, salvation will reach back and reclaim our history in its entirety. All our longings, all our disappointments, all our successes, and yes, even all our failures will be drawn into the redemption that Christ accomplished at His first coming. I do not know what form they will take as they are drawn into the new creation. Perhaps they will be absorbed and replaced as all things are made new. Or maybe, like ornaments hung on the Christmas tree, they will bear joyful witness to God’s faithfulness to us in the past. On that day, as the prophet Isaiah predicts, the Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces and remove His people’s disgrace from all the earth. We will have the celebration we have longed for all our lives and say, “Surely this is our God; we trusted in him, and he saved us. This is the Lord, we trusted in him; let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation” (Isa. 25:9).

After his wife, Joy Davidman, died of cancer, C. S. Lewis kept a journal of observations about the grief he felt. It concludes with her final moments. Lewis writes, “She said not to me but to the chaplain, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She smiled, but not at me.”

“She smiled, but not at me. “
C. S. Lewis

I remember being disturbed the first time I read these words. They seemed to speak of despair rather than hope. But the description is so like a sentence Lewis wrote in “The Weight of Glory,” that I have come to believe I was entirely mistaken about this. The sentence comes in a section of the essay where Lewis discusses the nature of glory. Lewis seems to be saying that the essence of this glory is a kind of recognition. The glory we hope for as Christians is to be known and recognized by God. More than this, according to Lewis, it is to be appreciated. This, Lewis explains, is what we long for–“to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son.”

It is this recognition or sense of belonging that we hunger for when we are caught up in longing, and it is the feeling that we are trying to create by the attempted reconstitution of our past through nostalgia. It is the sense of finally coming home. It is what compels us every year to go to such measures to create circumstances that will produce the feeling and whose subsequent failure so breaks our hearts that we aim for it again and again. “For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing,” Lewis explains. “Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance.”

“She smiled,” Lewis observed at his wife’s passing, “but not at me.”

It seems right to speak of death in the same breath as Advent because Advent is the season of ghosts. It is that rolling time of year when the spirit of Christmases past rises up to remind us that the world is still broken and that the home for which we long has not yet arrived. It has not come. But it is on its way.

[1] Charles Dickens, The Christmas Books, Vol. 1, (New York: Penguin, 1971), 69.

[2] C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, (New York: HarperOne, 1976), 29.

[3] Ibid., 30.

Eternity Shut in a Span

Featured ~ John Koessler ~ 6 Comments

December is the season when tinsel-haloed angels draped in bedsheets announce the birth of Christ to bathrobe-clad shepherds on the church stage. There is a kind of charm in the way we tell the nativity story that might fool people into thinking that it is merely a rustic folktale. But the Bible’s account of the birth of Christ is not a children’s story. It is a record of history and an act of divine revelation.

Luke begins his recounting of the Nativity story by anchoring the story to a particular place at a moment of time. Luke starts his telling, “in the days of Herod, king of Judea” (Luke 1:5). Its true beginning, however, is much earlier than this. Earlier than the reign of Herod. Earlier than the prophets who predicted Jesus’ coming. Even earlier than the promise made in the Garden that the seed of the woman would crush the serpent’s head (Gen. 3:15). Indeed, one might even say that this is a story without a beginning since, in the beginning, Jesus Christ, who is the Word, already was (John 1:1).

God, who has no beginning, entered time and space in the person of Jesus Christ. The God, who already was, took to Himself a human nature that He did not previously possess. The theological word for this is incarnation. It is a word that basically means “to become flesh.”

The Gospels describe the incarnation of Christ as a historical fact. But the Scriptures also point out that it was a revelatory event. The author of the letter to the Hebrews says that God has “spoken to us by his Son” and that Jesus is “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Heb. 1:1, 3). This assertion does more than claim that Jesus is God in human form. It distinguishes Jesus from the Father, just as John does when he says that the Word was “with God” and also “was God” (John 1:1).

Poet Richard Crashaw captured the mystery of our Lord’s birth with these words:

Welcome, all Wonders in one sight!

Eternity shut in a span.

Summer to winter, day in night,

Heaven in earth, and God in man.

But the Son of God was not born simply to make a poetic statement about God. His humanity does more than translate the divine into human terms. Jesus was born to die and rise again. Without the cross and the resurrection, Jesus’ translation of the divine nature into human experience would be little more than a babble to us. Without the deliverance which the Savior’s death and resurrection secured, the portrait of God that the incarnation provides would be meaningless. We would suppress its truth, just as we push down the things that God has revealed about Himself “from what has been made” (Rom. 1:20).

Jesus is also much more than a moral example. Without the cross’s power to cover sin and “put to death” whatever belongs to the sinful nature, the incarnation is like a virtuoso’s musical score, beautiful to hear but impossible to perform (Col 3:5). Viewing Christ as little more than a moral example reduces Him to a mere recapitulation of the law instead of its fulfillment. We may, like John, be able to look and touch (1 John 1:1), but we would never be able to follow. Jesus took on a human nature not only to correct our false perceptions about what God is like but to rescue us from the sin which was the cause of this distortion in the first place.

Jesus is more than a moral example.

When Christmas comes around, there is an unfortunate tendency to co-opt the nativity story for other purposes by placing it within frameworks that diminish its bearing on the Bible’s theology of atonement. It has been portrayed as a morality play about the plight of refugees, divine lobbying for the Pro-Life platform, an argument for showing hospitality, a statement about the role of women in the church, and much more. Perhaps the account of Christ’s birth has implications for all these concerns, but they are not its primary point. The main point of the nativity is that God became human.

The doctrine of the incarnation does not teach that the God merely took up residence in the man Jesus, who was subsequently elevated to a divine status. Neither does it assert that God only appeared to be a human. Instead, this teaching of the Church asserts that the incarnate Christ was both truly God and truly man. His divine nature did not alter his human nature and his humanity did not diminish his divinity.

The incarnation is fundamental to the Christian faith because it is the foundation of Christ’s atoning work. Jesus was made in human likeness so that he could suffer and die on the cross for our sins (Phil. 2:7–8). The fact that Jesus was made like us ensures that he is able to be a merciful high priest, one who understands and sympathizes with our struggle against temptation (Heb. 2:17–18). Christ’s true humanity also meant that he could suffer in our place by taking on himself the penalty for our sin. Though he was tempted like us in every point, Jesus was without sin (Heb. 4:15). This enabled him to go beyond sympathy and provide a genuine remedy for our transgressions through the shedding of his blood.

Jesus was, as the old confession says, “very God of very God.” Jesus shared our humanity, “so that by his death he might break the power of 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” (Heb. 2:14). To accomplish this Jesus had to be made like us. As Hebrews 2:17 says, “For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people.”

Jesus does not merely sympathize with our suffering and provide an example of what holiness looks like. He took our sin upon Himself. Jesus’ humanity meant that He could be pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities. His punishment brought us peace. By His wounds, we are healed. Jesus’ life was an offering for sin. His death was the price paid to the law in compensation for our sins. Because we have been united with Christ in His death, we can also share the hope of His resurrection (Isa. 53:11–12).

When we separate Christmas from the cross, all that remains is a charming story about a babe in a manger. It may be a tale fit for children, but it has no value for broken sinners. The Nativity of Christ is more than a sweet story. It was a cosmic revolution that shook creation to its very foundation. It brought about a change in the Person of Christ so that He became what He previously was not, without ceasing to be what He was before. Still God, but now in the flesh. There was never a time when the Word was not, but there was a time when the Word had not yet become flesh. Unto us has been born a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. Let all the tinseled angels shout this news to bathrobed shepherds everywhere. This is no tale but a fact of history. Our God has come. Clothed in human nature. And we will never be the same.

Holy Days, Holidays, & Christmas

Featured ~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

Christmas was important to me even before I called myself a Christian, though admittedly, this was mainly for non-religious reasons. I’ve long suspected that I have always loved Christmas more than any other holiday, not because of its spirituality but because it purchased my affections. It’s true that I loved the music and the pageantry. The glow of the lights and the smell of evergreen seemed to transport me to another world. But it was the presents that clinched the deal. When it came to gifts, Christmas was the motherload. Far better than birthdays or any other holiday.

When I became a follower of Jesus, I expected the change to transform Christmas the same way it transformed the rest of my life. I assumed the season, which seemed magical to me already, would become transcendent. It did not. If anything, the change somehow managed to dim the glow.

Perhaps this was because of the church culture to which I had become attached. The church tradition I joined was what is commonly described as a “low” church. Apart from Christmas and Easter, we didn’t follow the church calendar. Even the attention paid to those two days seemed grudging at times. We were proud of this bare-faced approach that disassociated us from Roman Catholicism, with its robes, smoke, and long lists of feasts that never seemed to involve actual food.

Of course, we had our own list of special days and celebrations. So I suppose you could say they were feasts of a sort. There were potlucks and suppers, the annual Valentine’s day banquet, and a church meal after every funeral. There were also a vast variety of informal meals, usually related to specific events or the passing of the seasons. But, in retrospect, it occurs to me that most of these occasions were more social than religious.

Christmas, on the other hand, was overtly religious. By it, we aimed to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. We did this with a measure of reserve. There were a few decorations, but they were not elaborate. A handful of evergreen sprigs and the occasional wreath decked out with red and green ribbons were usually enough. Some churches, which would normally have eschewed putting up a Christmas tree in the sanctuary because of its pagan roots, even constructed a large tree-shaped scaffold for the choir and covered it with pine branches.

We hunger for the presence of God
but tend to confuse transendence with ambiance.

Christmas Eve was the only time we allowed candles in the sanctuary. Instead of lighting them for the dead like Catholics, we held them in our hands. We dimmed the lights and sang Silent Night as the wax dripped on the upholstery of the pew in front of us. I liked the flickering shadows but hated the song, not because of its content but for its familiarity. It bored me. As a rule, my tastes in Christmas music tended toward the medieval. I would rather sing Prudentius or some repurposed Gregorian chant.

The low church tradition in which I still worship appears to have overcome its reticence about candles and greenery. Advent candles, midnight services on Christmas eve, and strung lights are so common these days that we hardly notice the difference anymore. The church I currently attend piles so many Christmas trees into the place of worship that it feels like we are at a campground instead of in the sanctuary. I have even visited a church that broadcasts Chuck Berry singing “Run, run, Rudolph!” through loudspeakers outside its front door. On the stage in the auditorium where the congregation meets, a smoke machine generates a thin shekinah of mechanical fog.

As for me, my tastes in worship, like my tastes in Christmas music, tend toward the minor key. I have always felt a little envious of my high church friends who, when they lift their eyes in worship, see arches and stained glass instead of ductwork. I have wondered what it would be like to preach a sermon wearing vestments. It would be refreshing to attend a church that feels like a church instead of feeling like I am visiting a shopping mall, an office complex, or a repurposed grocery store. But God, I suspect, does not really care. Even the tabernacle, raised by divine command and meticulously constructed according to the pattern revealed to Moses on the holy Mountain, turned out to be only “a copy and shadow of what is in heaven” (Heb. 8:5).

We hunger for a sense of the presence of God. But tend to confuse transcendence with ambiance. In its worship practices, the church seems to struggle to find the happy medium between Puritan austerity and baroque gaudiness. This struggle is further complicated by differences in culture, style, and taste. Not every church celebrates Christmas the same. Indeed, as far as Scripture is concerned, we do not need to observe Christmas as a holy day at all. There is certainly no evidence in the New Testament that the first Christians did. In his book Ancient Christian Worship, Andrew McGowan contrasts “the colorful calendars of feasts, fasts, and saints that churches of the fourth and fifth centuries celebrated” with “the relative silence” of the New Testament on such matters.[1] The apostle Paul criticized the Galatians for “observing special days and months and seasons and years” (Gal. 4:10). In Colossians 2:16, he warned the Colossians not to let anyone judge them “with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day.” Christmas, it would seem, is not the queen of days. We are free to observe it or not observe it as we wish.

God’s presence is more likely to show itself
on the periphery of our daily experience
than in the church sanctuary.

Meanwhile, when God’s presence does show itself, it is more likely to be on the periphery of our daily experience than in the church sanctuary. God seems to inhabit the corners and shadows, preferring the unnamed days of ordinary time to the high holy days from which we expect so much. He does not come with fanfare. But as the carol says, silently, and in the places where all our hopes and fears meet. “No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin, where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in.”

This is the message of Christmas. It is the old, old promise whispered in the Garden, shouted by the prophets, and trumpeted to shepherds on a hillside near Bethlehem. It is the good news that God has drawn near by taking on flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. He came with a real body to the real world. He came to die, rise, and will one day return. Only then will we know what it is like to experience God’s presence in its fullness.

[1] Andrew B. McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2014), 259.

REMYTHOLOGIZING CHRISTMAS: Why it’s Better to Wonder as We Wander

Featured ~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

Podcast (video): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Email | RSS

It’s that time of year when we tell the story of Christ’s Nativity. Then someone writes an article, publishes a book, or posts an exposé on social media telling us that everything we thought we knew about the old, old story is wrong. Yesterday, I saw one in my newsfeed shouting that Jesus’ family wasn’t poor after all. Joseph was a skilled tradesman who could afford to rent the stable because the inn was full. According to the retelling, it turns out that the stable wasn’t as rude and bare as the songs say. It was clean and private. I think it had wifi too.

Continue reading →

What Mary Knew

Featured ~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

When I was a boy I thought I heard angels sing. I was in my bedroom at the time and the sound seemed to come from a distance. I was perplexed by what I heard. When I opened the bedroom window the music grew louder. I thought I could see a heavenly glow beyond the rooftop of the house next door. The fact that Christmas was approaching was the clincher for me. It had to be a heavenly choir of angels jubilating over the birth of the Christ child. There could be no other explanation.

Actually, it turns out that there was a more mundane explanation for the phenomenon. Someone was selling Christmas trees over on the next block. They had strung the lot with colored lights. The music I heard was only a phonograph connected to a loudspeaker. So much for my heavenly visitation. But I have often thought back on that brief moment of transcendence when I was certain I heard the angels sing on high.

When Gabriel appeared to Mary, there was no burst of song but a herald’s announcement. “Greetings, you who are highly favored!” the angel said. “The Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28). Artists have pictured this as a transcendent moment for Mary but Luke paints it differently. Mary is not moved to bliss by the angel’s words but to perplexity. She was troubled by what she heard. Perhaps she heard in them an echo of the angel’s greeting to Gideon as he threshed grain in a cistern and brooded about Israel’s defeat. In the Bible, this sort of promise always seems to be the precursor to an especially difficult assignment.

Or perhaps it was the ascription of God’s special favor that surprised Mary. It is true that Mary was from a royal line. But beyond that, there does not seem to have been much else about her life that made it singularly blessed. She was just a young girl betrothed to the local carpenter. Neither of them was rich. They do not seem to have had any grandiose plans for themselves. Until now there was no reason to believe that their life together would be any different from any other couple in their village.

The details the angel provides reveal the singular favor that will be bestowed upon Mary. “You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus,” the angel commanded. “He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.” (Luke 1:30-33).

Yet instead of reassurance, the angel’s promise only served to trouble Mary further. “How will this be,” Mary replied, “since I am a virgin?” She was of childbearing age. She was already engaged. How did she think it would happen? Mary’s question makes sense only if we understand the angel to be saying that this conception will be unusual. No man will father this child. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you,and the power of the Most High will overshadow you” the angel promised. “So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.”

Still, among all the remarkable words exchanged in this encounter, the most astonishing were those of Mary herself.“I am the Lord’s servant,” she replied after she had heard all these things. “May it be to me as you have said.” Did Mary know what she was agreeing to do? She knew at least this much: she would become pregnant before she was married and the only explanation she could give for this was that God was the baby’s father. She could not have concocted a more unlikely explanation if she had tried. If Mary was anxious about Joseph’s reaction, she gave no indication of it. After all, why should she be anxious? She knew what kind of man Joseph was. Scripture reveals that he was a man of faith, quick to do what he knew to be God’s will.

One dimension of the favor spoken of by the angel when he appeared to Mary was her distinctive role in the drama of redemption. Long before she was born, the judgment declared to Satan in the Garden of Eden foreshadowed Mary’s entrance into the story: “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel” (Gen. 3:15). Mary is the virgin spoken of in Isaiah 7:14 (cf. Matt. 1:23). Her place in the Nativity story is so crucial that it has led some to claim that there would be no Jesus without Mary. Although well-meaning, such rhetoric is, at best, unfortunate. Mary was not necessary to Jesus’ existence. Long before Mary was born or the world created, Jesus already was. According to John 1:1, He was “with God” and He “was God.”

Mary’s distinctive role lay in the fact that she was the vessel through whom our Lord took to Himself a human nature.

Mary’s distinctive role lay in the fact that she was the vessel through whom our Lord took to Himself a human nature. As the second-century church leader Ignatius of Antioch put it in his letter to the church of Smyrna, Jesus is “truly of the family of David with respect to his human descent” and also “Son of God with respect to the divine will and power” (Smyr. 1:1).7 Or, as he wrote in his letter to the Ephesians, there is a sense in which it can be said that Jesus is both “from Mary” and “from God” (Eph. 7:2).8

Yet as important as Mary is to the Christmas story, her presence on the biblical stage is strangely brief. After the nativity account, she reappears only a few times. On one occasion, when Jesus was twelve years old, she chastened Jesus for disappearing during a family visit to Jerusalem. After a three-day search, Mary and Joseph found Him in the temple courts listening to the teachers and asking them questions. Luke 2:48 describes the reaction: “When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, ‘Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.’” Eighteen years later, we find Mary at the wedding in Cana, urging Jesus to do something when the host runs out of wine ( John 2:3). Then again, after Jesus begins his public ministry, she shows up outside the house, where a crowd has gathered to hear Him teach. Mary is seemingly rebuffed both times (John 2:4; Mark 3:34–35; cf. Matt. 12:46–50).

The next time we see her, Mary is standing at the foot of the cross near the beloved disciple John. According to John 19:26–27: “When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, ‘Woman, here is your son,’ and to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ From that time on, this disciple took her into his home.”

After this, Mary more or less disappears from view. She has a brief cameo at the beginning of the book of Acts, which merely says that she was present on the day of Pentecost (Acts 1:4). She does not seem to be mentioned in the New Testament epistles at all unless she was “the chosen lady” to whom John addressed his second epistle (2 John 1:1).

What, then, are we to think of Mary? As far as Nativity is concerned, she has a starring role. But when it comes to the overall drama that plays out in the four Gospels, she seems more like a bit player and foil. Yet, despite the brevity of her appearances in these accounts, we are left with a definite impression. First, we see that Mary was, first and foremost, a mother. When Mary shows up, she behaves toward Jesus like any mother would toward her son. Mary was a woman of deep faith. Her song of praise in Luke 1:46–55, known as the Magnificat, is biblically literate, theologically sophisticated, and poetically rich. What is more, this faith was combined with great courage. She had to understand the social implications of conceiving a child without a human father. Despite this, she raises no objections about the cost to her reputation, how it will affect her impending marriage to Joseph, or about the implications it will have on their life together. Mary asks only how it will happen (Luke 1:34).

These days Christmas music seems to like to portray Mary as fragile and uncertain. In one song she asks God to “hold her together” and wants to know if He wonders whether “a wiser one” should have taken her place. Another song runs through a list of theological affirmations about the incarnation and asks, “Mary, did you know?” The answer to the first question is no, and the answer to the second is yes. Mary was probably young, but I do not think she was fragile. Her actions reveal that she was brave, persistent, and obedient. Certainly, there is much that Mary could not have known about what it would mean to give birth to God’s son. The one thing Mary did know was that she was the Lord’s servant.

Christmas Traveler: Why the Nativity is About the Cross

December 20, 2020June 15, 2023 ~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

In this year of COVID-19, the governor of my state has asked everyone to stay home for Christmas. To be honest, it feels strange. For many, Christmas is a time for traveling. The same was true of the first Christmas. The Gospel narratives of Christ’s birth are crowded with travelers. Zechariah, the priest, travels to Jerusalem to burn incense before the Lord and is struck with dumb surprise when the angel announces that he and his wife Elizabeth would have a son in their old age. Mary travels too, heading for the hills to visit her relative, Elizabeth. Then to Bethlehem with Joseph to give birth to the miracle child conceived by the Holy Spirit. Shepherds hurry into the night, leaving their flock behind to find the babe wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger. Magi travel from the east by caravan to lay their gifts before the newborn king of the Jews, while Joseph and Mary flee to Egypt to escape King Herod’s wrath. Everybody in the Christmas story, it seems, is on the road.

Yet of all the travelers in the Christmas narrative, none comes as far as Jesus. His is a journey that is measured not in miles but position. “Out of the ivory palaces, into a world of woe,” an old hymn says. The opening of John’s Gospel clarifies that the change was even more profound than the hymn-writer imagines. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us,” John declares (John 1:14). The theologians describe this in literal terms as the incarnation, the enfleshing of the Word of God. At the incarnation, Jesus Christ took a human nature to Himself without ceasing to be divine.

If the theologians express the literal sense of John’s theology with this language, the 17th-century poet Richard Crashaw captures John’s lyrical warmth when he writes,

Welcome, all Wonders in one sight!

Eternity shut in a span.

Summer to winter, day in night,

Heaven in earth, and God in man.

The poet’s phrase “eternity shut in a span” measures the distance between heaven’s throne and Bethlehem’s manger. There was both an addition and a subtraction in the incarnation. Jesus took to Himself a human nature that He previously did not possess. The babe of Bethlehem was a real infant, as helpless and dependent as any other. At that moment, the creator of all things became both actor and the one acted upon. The eternal Word was conceived by God, born of a virgin, and laid in a manger. The Son of God became the child of Mary. By this act, Jesus laid aside something as well. In Philippians 2:7 the apostle Paul says that Jesus, who was God by nature, “made Himself nothing” at the incarnation. The Greek text says that Christ “emptied” Himself.

We should not see this as an abdication. Jesus did not cease to be divine when He took on flesh and blood. Instead, this was more of a refusal. He refused to cling to the rights and prerogatives that belonged to Him because of His divinity. As one translation of Philippians 2:6 puts it, Jesus did not consider equality with God “something to be used to his own advantage.” When He was made in human likeness, Jesus took up the nature of a servant. Paul’s language in these verses is deliberate. Confinement to human form was more than a symbolic statement for Jesus. True humanity was essential for the specific task that Jesus came to perform. When Jesus was “found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!” (Phil. 2:8). Jesus took on flesh so that He could die.

That death is the linchpin of the theology of the incarnation. Remove it, and the story of Christ’s nativity becomes immeasurably reduced, as does the rest of His life and ministry. Without His death on the cross, Jesus is only another wagging finger urging us to attempt what we cannot attain. Such a Christ may be a moral example, but He is no savior. Likewise, the resurrection of Jesus is a necessary complement to His obedience to the point of death. Without the resurrection, Jesus is merely another martyr in a long line of martyrs, and the gospel is no longer the gospel. The apostle does indeed set Jesus before us as an example when he tells us to “have the same mindset as Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5). But this is only because he presents Jesus as our savior first, the one who died for our sins and rose again for our justification. Those who do not recognize Christ as their savior cannot take Him as their example. Jesus is always a gift before He is a model.

Jesus had to be born to die. Without that death, there would be no remedy for our sin. Jesus had to be raised from the dead to make us alive to God. It is only by that resurrection that we can follow Christ’s example. This means that the manger, the cross, and the empty tomb are inseparable. Remove one, and the rest must fall away as well. It also means that the trajectory of our spiritual journey mirrors that of Jesus Christ. We move from physical birth to the cross to the empty tomb and then to glory. Only those who have been united with Christ in His death and resurrection can follow His descent into humility. All of this rests on the fulcrum of the incarnation. Without it, none of the rest would be possible. By submitting to incarnation, Jesus Christ not only placed Himself at the Father’s disposal, but He also made Himself dependent upon the Father to complete His task.

These days it is common to hear people talk about the “magic” of Christmas. Those who speak this way are usually just talking about ambiance. Christmas movies and television commercials imply that celebrating Christmas will produce a transcendent experience. Broken relationships will suddenly mend. Prodigals will come home. The broken-hearted find love at last, and all the ills of the world will be mended, at least for one day. We are foolish enough to believe this false vision, failing to recognize that what they are really selling is an atmosphere, along with the products that create it. We have mistaken the rhetoric of marketing for mystery.

What is truly missing from our Christmas is not magic but memory. We do not need more atmosphere but an understanding of the incarnation. We have forgotten what the original story was all about. In many cases, we have removed the original story altogether. We have tried to improve it by garnishing it with tinsel and lights or have reduced the original narrative to such a degree that all we have left is a string of sentimental images.

If we wish to know the wonder of Christmas, we will need to recapture a vision of “eternity shut in a span.” To do that, we must go beyond the manger. We need to travel the rest of the way with Jesus. From the manger to the cross to the tomb, and beyond. We will need to remember that Jesus did not enter the fairy tale world of soft snow and gossamer-winged angels that we sing about in carols and see on Christmas cards. He came to a world of hard roads and even harsher realities. The path our Lord traveled was not one that went from glory to glory. It was primarily, as Paul reminds us, a path of downward mobility.

Jesus began His life as a fugitive and ended it as a political prisoner. Kings and priests sought His death. His followers frequently misunderstood Him and, in His last hours, finally abandoned Him. In other words, Jesus came into our world, a broken world filled with disappointments. He came like us, in flesh and blood, yet without sin. Jesus took on flesh, knowing full well all that it would entail. Confinement to the limits of human nature. Restraint in the exercise of His divine power. And ultimately, in the Garden of Gethsemane, a refusal from His Heavenly Father to let Him escape the cup of suffering. Jesus did not do these things out of necessity but voluntarily. Nor did He do them to create a magical holiday season. Jesus did them, as the old Creed declares, for us, and for our salvation. Thanks be to God.

Nativity Poem

April 30, 2020April 30, 2020 ~ John Koessler ~ 10 Comments

Do not be afraid

the angel said

in such commanding tone

that we almost believed

he could put to flight

our fears with a Word.

And all we like sheep

each one scattering

in his own direction

with the sheep themselves

skipping and bleating

like waves dancing

on the water.

We were sore afraid

but not so afraid

that we could not leave

those few sheep

in the desert

and hurry off.

What do you think

we found when

we got to Bethlehem?

Nothing but a child

wrapped in rags

and lying in a manger.

And His shy mother

so patient with

our blushing and fumbling

until she was distracted

by the child’s cry.

The Ghosts of Christmas Past

December 17, 2019June 17, 2023 ~ John Koessler ~ 2 Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Email | RSS

A few months ago, my next-door neighbor told me that the house down the street is haunted. She used to own the place and claims she saw the spirit who inhabits it more than once. She says that it is the ghost of a little boy from the early 1900s, with bobbed hair and knickers, who occasionally appears in the kitchen. I’m not sure what to make of her claim, but I do believe that many of us are haunted. Especially at this time of year. Not by literal ghosts but by memories. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, who was visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past, we are visited by the flickering memories of Christmases that are now gone.

Scrooge’s visit was a kind of reality check, but ours is something else. Ours is a reconstruction. We sort through the fragments of past experience scene by scene, the way an archaeologist sifts through the debris of an ancient civilization. Instead of bits of pottery, we handle shards of memory. Some are broken and fragmentary. These recollections are tinted by the soft glow of nostalgia, a spice that is sweet as powdered sugar but can leave a bitter aftertaste. The recollection of others is more spectral in form. They are haunted in the classic sense, as they contemplate the remains of things that have gone to ruin. The memory of someone whose space is empty casts a shadow on the table. The memory of a past offense or some horror puts a nightmare cast on their recollection.

When Scrooge asked the Ghost of Christmas Past what business brought him to his bedside, the Spirit’s answer was: “Your welfare!” But our ghosts seem to have a more malevolent intent. They aim to disturb. Those memories that trade in nostalgia want to make us jealous. They show us shadows of things that never were and leave us longing for a world we never knew. Those whose trade is fear want to bring us to despair. They show us a world of sin but one without a savior. The pain they bring to mind is real, but it is not the whole story. Hidden from those haunted memories is the hand of God moving in the shadows.

When Scrooge asked the Ghost of Christmas Past what business brought him to his bedside, the Spirit’s answer was. “Your welfare!” But our ghosts seem to have a more malevolent intent.

We prefer our holiday season to be serene and magical. We are hoping for a moment of transcendence. We deck the halls and trim the tree. We bake and buy and then settle back to wait. But all too often, our experience is the opposite. Instead of Christmas magic, we get the critical mother-in-law who thinks their child could have done better. The kids like their toys but only for a day or two. The dysfunction that has stalked the family for the previous eleven months refuses to take a vacation. Somebody we love gets sick. Another dies. Or we discover that the real spoiler is our own heart, which leads us on as the day approaches, and then suddenly turns a cold shoulder after it finally arrives.

Before you dismiss me as a curmudgeon (perhaps it is already too late), let me say that I have been a devotee of Christmas for as long as I can remember. Christmas has captivated me since childhood. I can feel its approach as soon as the winds turn to chill in the fall. I start listening to Christmas carols on November 1 and it is only with effort that I manage to restrain myself from starting earlier. I smile every time I watch Scrooge’s gleeful repentance on Christmas morning and weep when George Bailey learns that no man is a failure who has friends. But I must tell you that Christmas has let me down every time. By the time the 26th arrives, I am done. The tree and all its decorations can go back to their place. They seem awkward and out of place to me, as wizened and worn out as Miss Havisham’s wedding dress.

I won’t deny that there are moments of transcendence during the holiday season: The peal of the trumpet during the resurrection sequence in Handel’s Messiah. The sight of wind driven clouds flying across the moon at night. The constellation glitter of the snow as it falls. But these are only momentary stabs of joy. These sensations, as C. S. Lewis has pointed out, disappear as soon as we become aware of them and cannot be manufactured. Play the same song. Visit the same spot. Try to reproduce the circumstances exactly, and you will only be disappointed. But this is, I think, what we are often trying to do during the Christmas season. We are attempting to manufacture joy and hold on to it, at least for a few days.

We are attempting to manufacture joy and hold on to it, at least for a few days.

Unfortunately, the fallen world conspires against us. If it is not the harsh croak of misfortune that bursts in and interrupts our revels, it is misfortune’s plainer sister boredom. We go looking for the sublime only to find the usual. The enchanted world we hoped to create for ourselves proves to be a tangle of colored lights and a pasteboard tableau of the three kings with a camel. The choir is singing off-key, but it really wouldn’t matter if they weren’t, because we hate the song anyway.

Yet we may have more in common with the true Christmas experience than we realize. After all, Jesus didn’t descend from heaven in a cloud of glory. He came into the world by water and blood, as all infants do. There were signs and wonders that marked His birth. But there was also misunderstanding, jealousy, and terror. Joseph considered divorcing Mary. Herod slew all the children of Bethlehem that were two years old or younger. The Holy Family fled for their lives and relocated to Egypt for a time. The version of these events that we see on our Christmas cards or in our imagination is a sanitized one. There is no hard traveling, no fear, and no violence. Our version is a kind of fairy tale, the sort we might read to our children at night to lull them to sleep.

What I am trying to say is that the world Jesus entered was far more like the world we know than the one we fantasize about, whether those fantasies are good or bad. When the Apostle John describes Christ’s entrance into the drama of redemption in Revelation 12, we see a very different portrait. Admittedly, John’s narrative is oblique and far-reaching. He speaks in visions and goes beyond the nativity stories of the Gospels. Yet John’s wild images make clear what the Gospels’ more narrow and literal depictions confirm. The world that the Son of God entered, when He took human form and was born in Bethlehem, was not a tranquil one. Jesus did not come into the soft bed of a manger lit by twinkling starlight and serenaded by the lullaby of angels. He entered a world of blood and tears. Jesus came to a habitation of dragons (Revelation 12:4). The angels who announced His arrival were not plump cheeked cherubs or fragile seraphs with gossamer wings. They were an armed troop who announced the arrival of the Lord of Heaven with a shout of victory.

Jesus did not come into the soft bed of a manger lit by twinkling starlight and serenaded by the lullaby of angels.

Don’t misunderstand me. There is nothing wrong with remembering the past. Remembrance is a sacred discipline in the Christian faith. When Jesus handed the disciples the bread and the cup, He told them to eat and drink in remembrance of Him. But I think we should approach our memories, especially at this time of year, with a degree of skepticism. Enjoy the vision, but don’t try to recreate it. Appreciate the memory the way you would a passing fragrance and then let it dissolve into mist the way that all dreams do.

The same is true of those memories that terrify us. They appear suddenly, like Lazarus from the tomb, still wrapped in their grave-clothes. But unlike Lazarus, they carry the smell of the grave and the clench of fear. They rear up like a shadow cast upon the wall by a guttering candle and want us to believe that they still have the power to threaten us. But they are only ghosts and echoes.

Despite our expectations, Jesus did not come into this world to create a magical Christmas season. His sights were set on the cross. The ghosts in Dickens’ tale came to help Scrooge understand his past, but Jesus came to purchase our redemption. To do this, He not only entered into our suffering; Jesus took our sin upon Himself. “When the set time had fully come, God sent his Son,” Galatians 4:4–5, says, “born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.”

“Who is He in yonder stall, at whose feet the shepherds fall?” the old carol asks. He is the Ancient of Days, the God of the Past. He is the God of your past. This is the God who made the light and who seeks you out in dark places. He is the God who knows your dreams and meets you in your disappointments. But more than this, He is the God who saves. “’Tis the Lord, O wondrous story! ’Tis the Lord, the King of glory!’ At His feet we humbly fall, Crown Him, crown Him Lord of all!”

While Shepherds Watched their Flocks

December 24, 2018December 24, 2018 ~ John Koessler ~ 2 Comments

Two shepherds were seated before a small fire. They alternated between making small talk and sitting in silence, like those who are long acquainted. There beyond the glowing rim of the firelight, the flock was huddled in congregation. The men too were huddled against the chill of night, wearing wool and leaning into the flames.

High above, the wheeling stars winked in and out, flickering like candles as they calculated the number of Abraham’s offspring. In the black distance beyond the flock, a night bird cried out in indignation, surprised by a wolf who had come near. He eyed the sheep hungrily. He had been watching them for two nights now. But when another figure appeared unexpectedly at the edge of the shepherd’s camp, the wolf turned and fled.

There had been no shuffle of approaching footsteps, only a sudden flare of light as if one of them had stirred the fire. The stranger stepped across the threshold, and the shepherds shrank back in alarm. One of them scrabbled for his staff and raised it in defense as the other cowered. But the stranger only laughed good-naturedly.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I come bearing good news. It is news of a great joy for all the people. This very day in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.”

The shepherds looked at one another and then back at the figure, who by now was lit so brightly that they had to shade their eyes to see him. The light radiated from him the way heat does when it shimmers off the rocks in the desert sun. ”This will be a sign to you,” he continued. “You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

By now the whole field was lit so that the tiny camp looked like a city in flames. In its glow, the shepherds realized that the angel was not alone. There was a whole troop with him, standing in ranks. “Glory to God in the highest” they shouted. They sounded like an army cheering their captain after some victory. “And on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests!” The cry made the shepherds want to cheer too.

Then as if in response to some command, the angel leaped into the air and the rest of the host followed suit. In the space of a breath, they were gone. The winking stars appeared again. There was a pop as sparks flew up from their fire. And the shepherds were left staring into the night sky.

“Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about,” one of them said. The other grunted his assent. The flock had scattered because of the commotion. Their plaintive bleating could be heard in the distance. But the two men paid them no mind. They hurried off into the night, leaving their staffs behind.

Joseph’s Dream

December 19, 2018December 19, 2018 ~ John Koessler ~ 2 Comments

Joseph was awake, just as he had been every night since Mary told him the news. He shook his head at the recollection, just as he had every time he thought about it. Mary was pregnant. He thought he knew her. He was sure he knew her. How could he have been so wrong?

Joseph considered getting out of bed and trying to work but it was late. The noise would surely wake the neighbors. Besides, he couldn’t concentrate. He had tried all day, only to realize that he was staring and shaking his head. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. Joseph was grateful for the distraction. But in a moment it all came rushing back. Mary came back to Nazareth after visiting relatives in the hill country of Judah for three months. The trip had been sudden, without explanation. Joseph hadn’t thought much about it at the time. Perhaps Mary had gone to see her cousin Elizabeth for advice about marriage.

When Mary returned, she was a different woman. She went away a virgin and came home pregnant. Of course, Joseph refused to accept it when he was told. How could he do otherwise? But Mary insisted. She did not blush. “An angel appeared to me,” she explained with a smile. Joseph could tell that she expected him to believe her explanation. “The angel told me that the Holy Spirit would come upon me and the power of the Most High would overshadow me,” she said. “And he did! The child I am carrying is the son of God!”

Joseph shook his head again at the memory. It wasn’t possible. How could it be? He was sure there was some other explanation. A drunken Roman soldier who overpowered Mary and took advantage of her on the road, perhaps. Maybe Mary had concocted this unbelievable story out of fear that Joseph would call off their betrothal. The pregnancy could not have been voluntary. Mary had been forced. He was sure of it. She must have been! The story she told seemed like something only a lunatic would say.

Joseph had said nothing to her at the time. He was afraid to. He simply turned on his heel and walked out the door. He spent the rest of the day working furiously. As if work could somehow make everything go away. He desperately wanted things to go back to the way they were before Mary’s trip. But things would never be the same between them again. How could they? People in the village were beginning to talk. There were awkward questions from some of his customers. Mary was starting to show.

The dog barked again. Then it yelped. Maybe some sleeping householder had thrown a rock to frighten it away, Joseph thought. The thought made him uncomfortable. He was a man of faith. He knew what the Rabbi would say. Joseph would have to divorce Mary. He also knew what kind of punishment the Law of Moses prescribed for Mary’s situation. Unless she could prove that the thing had happened against her will, Mary could be liable to the death penalty. A public divorce would lead to a trial and if Mary persisted with this ridiculous story of hers a public trial was likely to lead to death by stoning.

People would say that it served her right. He supposed that he should be angry. Maybe even pleased that such a fate awaited her. But he only felt helpless. He did not want to see Mary disgraced publically. He did not want her to die. So Joseph made his decision. He would divorce Mary. But quietly. There would be no trial. No public disgrace. He didn’t know how the two of them could continue to live in the same village. Maybe he would move. He would think about that later.

The decision made, Joseph lay in the dark as sleep finally overtook him. For the first time since he had heard the news, he felt calm. A night breeze stole in through the window, carrying with it the scent from a vagrant patch of daffodils which had sprung up nearby. Only then did Joseph notice the figure standing at the foot of his bed.

Joseph sensed more than saw him. It was shadow upon shadow. Joseph felt his presence but could not make out his face or form. Joseph tried to move but it was as if all his limbs were paralyzed. He tried to speak. But could not make a sound. Was someone there or not? Then the figure spoke. His voice was reassuring as if he had overheard Joseph’s tortured deliberation. “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit” he said. “She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

All the arguments Joseph had already marshaled against such an explanation rose up within him. He would have interrupted if he could speak. But he was still frozen in place. Unable to move. Unable to utter a sound.

As though the angel heard Joseph’s unspoken objection, he said, “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel.’” His tone was patient but firm. The kind one might use when explaining some simple fact to a child. The sort that a teacher uses to remind a student of something they should already know. At the mention of the child’s name, Joseph understood. The child that is to be born will be called “God with us.” Suddenly it all seemed so clear to him. And so obvious. Why hadn’t he seen it before?

At once Joseph was awake and alert. His heart felt light, like one who has awakened after a long illness and for the first time in weeks is feeling whole. Joseph leaped from his bed and dressed in haste, the first rose light of dawn just beginning to glimmer on the horizon. His plan had been to go to the Rabbi at first light. But instead, he flew down the path in the opposite direction. Towards Mary’s house. His steps set the dog to barking again. He could hear someone calling out Mary’s name over and over. Joseph laughed when he recognized the voice as his own.