We all know that Christmas is a great evangelistic opportunity. Yet with the gun going off to tie up work, attend all kinds of events, plan gatherings, buy gifts, and somehow still function after it all … how could I ever add evangelism into the mix?
Rather than tell you simply to ‘share the gospel’, I want instead to spend a moment together pondering the glory of Christmas. Because before Christmas is a time of proclamation, it is a time to make room in our hearts for adoration. And it’s from a full heart that our mouth will speak.
Centuries ago, in a backwater Israeli town, an angel came to an ordinary girl with staggering news: though she was a virgin, she would conceive by the Holy Spirit and bear a son, who would be called Saviour (Matt 1:21) and God-with-us (Matt 1:23). Mary’s response is also staggering. She simply makes room for God to act—not generally in the world, but specifically in her womb: “Let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).
Why does this matter? First, this act of God is not prior to the gospel but is itself the beginning of the gospel. It was pointed out to me that at key moments in Jesus’ life there is darkness: darkness in the womb, darkness at the cross, darkness in the tomb, and the pre-dawn darkness on the day that he rose. The theme of darkness ties these moments together, pointing to the fact that they are all part of God’s one great saving act.
Second, this one act of God is nothing less than new creation. The overshadowing Spirit (Luke 1:35) and the moments of darkness point us back to the darkness at the very beginning, when the Spirit hovered over the waters as God prepared to speak creation into existence (Gen 1:1-2). And so, as the Spirit conceives and implants the embryonic Son of God in Mary’s womb, God begins his new creation work.
By entering the world through the womb, God signals that he is not done with our earthiness. The new is not a rescue from physicality but is instead the renewal of physical reality.
Secularism says my fleshly existence is an accidental given. Eastern religion and the Western New Age may worship nature, but only to touch the divine and escape the flesh. Jewish and Islamic views may honour the material world as God’s creation, but not as our destination. And the deeper we go into the Silicon Valley age, the harder it is to value our sheer earthiness—the real me is seen as deep inside this bag of skin and bones.
But God loves our ‘fleshiness’. He was not embarrassed to enter Mary’s womb, nor to be comforted by her embrace, nor to be sustained at her breast. By taking on not only a gruesome cross but also a gory birth, our saviour takes upon himself our entire, earthy humanity, gathering up every moment from birth to death.
Not only does this give motherhood the greatest possible dignity—from the pain, tears and fears of pregnancy and birth to that great labour of raising a child—it also gives the greatest possible dignity to humanity: fleshy, vulnerable and glorious.
All those ordinary, sometimes mundane, things we rush to do as the year closes—from the school performance to the gathered meal or flopping on the couch at the end of it all—can be the things that distract us from the glory of Christmas. And yet, the irony is that it is precisely the baby in the manger who underlines the value and dignity of, not only these things, but our entire earthy existence.
At the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, stigma and fear were high, and patients felt their humanity stripped away in lonely isolation and rejection. In the uncertainty around how the disease was transmitted, often nurses on AIDS wards would not disclose the nature of their work out of fear. But then, Diana, the People’s Princess, did something staggering. In a moment of great courage and compassion, she reached out to touch a man dying from AIDS and gave him back his humanity. She was already beautiful in the people’s eyes—now she shone with glory.
How much more glorious is Jesus, who comes down not just to touch our humanity, but to take it upon himself, to gather it up, and to bring it with him into his new creation.
This Christmas, let’s make room in our hearts and homes to adore our glorious Jesus—through the songs we play, the decorations we place, the devotions we read. In any and every way, let our hearts be filled with his glory until, we can’t help but take every opportunity to speak of him.