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Christmas Eve 2024
One of the things I have long found difficult is to know where my role as pastor ends and my role as neighbour or friend begins. It’s a question a member of my family has long told me may have legal implications should I give someone a ride and be involved in an accident. Would liability be assessed based on whether I acted as pastor of the church or as a neighbour or friend?
The question is tricky because being part of a church means to be part of a community and being a community is based on relationship, and relationships are not genuine if they are merely transactional.
When I was first ordained someone told me they had run into my predecessor at a department store but that he had looked the other way and acted as if he had not seen them. Since they did not actually have an interaction nothing at all could be inferred. Besides, it was gossip. But I tell this sad little story because it expresses the expectation that my relationship with a person is not restricted to my working hours, especially in a church, for we are a community.
It is Christmas Eve and we heard the story surrounding the birth of Jesus. But we celebrate Christmas because of what happened in the life of the One whose birth we celebrate, which is why the early church celebrated Easter before it celebrated Christmas. The Apostle Paul writes that if Christ had not been raised from the dead, our faith would be in vain. (1 Cor 15) So, when we celebrate Christmas we anticipate what is to come.
When I was little I would spend time listening to classical music with my father. I would sit next to him on the living room sofa. We had little time together and I am thankful for those hours, even if I did have to be quiet.
My dad had a large record collection to which my brother and I contributed every Christmas and every birthday. One of the works we listened to was Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion, a musical piece using the words of the 26th and 27th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel as well as hymns to tell the story of the Jesus’s arrest, humiliation and crucifixion. It is an extraordinary work of music.
St Matthew’s Passion contains two hymns I sung as a child, one of them I had to memorize in confirmation class. The church still sings them today.
The first one is titled, Ah, Holy Jesus. It is a meditation on the cause of Jesus’ suffering and death.
The second one is O Sacred Head, Now Wounded. It also is a meditation on Christ’s suffering.
Both are very beautiful and I can’t think them out of my life or out of Bach’s work. And yet.
The first one contains the line,
Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee.
‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee;
I crucified thee.
The second contains these words,
Thy grief and bitter passion
were all for sinners’ gain;
mine, mine was the transgression,
but thine the deadly pain.
And that brings us back to the beginning because the way that I understand these words is that they not so much describe a relationship but a transaction. We sinned and God could only forgive us by punishing Jesus. Jesus paid the price for our sin and we go free.
That is a transaction. And it does not even involve us.
I am fine with the result but not the way the hymn writers envision it.
The 13th century Scottish theologian John Duns Scotus once asked whether God would have elected to be born into the world in Jesus had Adam and Eve not sinned. Was God’s plan in Jesus only a rescue mission or was it more? In other words, is Christmas only about solving the problem of human sin, or does Christmas say something about the character of God?
Isaiah is one of the books of the Bible. In chapter seven, written in the 8th century BC, Isaiah declares, “the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel. (7:14)
Of course, the one born at Bethlehem is named Jesus, and so the evangelist Matthew tells us what Immanuel means. Matthew quotes Isaiah and says, “… and they shall name him Emmanuel’, which means, ‘God is with us.’” (1:23)
God is with us. If we look at the arc of the story from creation to revelation, from beginning to end, it is a story about God creating us for relationship, with God walking and talking in the Garden of Eden, and coming to dwell with us in Revelation. The vision of the Book of Revelation is not one of death and destruction but one of promise, ending with these words,
“… the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”
That is God with us, as Isaiah had foretold and Matthew remembered, yet neither Isaiah not Matthew made it up, rather, it was always God’s design from the beginning. Being together, as we are together now, and will be in our celebrations during these days, is not transactional, even if we succumbed to the expectation that we have to give presents to those who give presents to us. It is not about presents but about presence. It is not about transactions but neighbourliness and friendship. God has come to dwell with us. God’s coming and God’s presence are our gift, and in turn we gift our presence to God and to each other.
There is one last problem I have with understanding our relationship with God or anyone as transactional. It is that transactions don’t change us. We remain the same. If anything, we become more set in our ways, perhaps more mercenary. In King Herod we see how the calling to be human and to be in relationship is sacrificed for power, and Herod’s humanity is lost in the process.
Relationships, however, change us. Which is why God has come to us in Jesus, and which is why being human is all about relationships, with God and with each other. We see that among shepherds and wise men, between Mary and Joseph, among the disciples, and among us. God has come to dwell with us.
Merry Christmas!
