Thursday, December 25, 1997

Returning to true meaning of Christmas

By Cal Thomas

At first, God manifested Himself in big things -- the burning bush, pillars of fire and smoke, a parted Red Sea. All of these communicated His power. But when He chose to communicate His nature to humans, God manifested Himself as a baby.

Almost everyone likes a baby, including the Bethlehem infant. Not everyone likes the adult that infant became because not everyone accepts His message, which tells us we are not dysfunctional victims in need of reform but sinners in need of redemption. So as the baby leaves the manger, we drift away from Him. Indeed, we counterfeit Christmas and obscure the Light with lesser lights. The power of the Christmas message is camouflaged by our worship of material things. But we were not meant to find peace in the length of our resumes, whom we know, our talent, social position or bank account.

The baby who became an adult said we could never know or understand Him with adult minds. Instead, He said, we must become as a little child, stripping off our intellectual self-satisfaction and putting on the cloak of innocence that arrives with infancy.

C.S. Lewis gets to the heart of the message God is trying to communicate: "The second person in God, the son, became human himself; was born into the world as an actual man -- a real man of a particular height, with hair of a particular color, speaking a particular language, weighing so many stone. The eternal being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a fetus inside a woman's body. If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab."

That makes sense, doesn't it? If you speak to a cow, she does not understand what you are saying, but she understands other cows. If God wanted to speak to cows, He would have to become one. He wanted to speak to us, so, he took on the human form.

Today it's hard to hear His message because so many have papered it over with other things, such as pride or pleasure or wealth. We've self-centered Christmas, when God wanted it to be selfless. After all, giving up your only Son is about the most selfless act there is. And so, rather than learning more, we really need to unlearn if we are to see and hear clearly what Christmas was meant to be. Becoming a child again means learning to trust, but not ourselves.

Can God be trusted to speak to us clearly and truthfully? That is a question related to character -- His, not ours. We've made it difficult to reach Him by the things we've placed in His way, especially "religion," which is man's attempt to reach God. God made it simple, like a baby is simple.

Forget what you've learned as an adult and begin to unlearn backward. Like counting backward gets you closer to zero, unlearning backward until you reach intellectual and experiential infancy gets you closer to the manger and to God incarnate.

God's message has never been popular because the things He asks us to do have never been popular, but the message is so simple that a child can understand it. And it is personal, not corporate and certainly not governmental.

It is reflected in a little song lyric I learned some years ago: "Christmas isn't Christmas 'til it happens in your heart; somewhere deep inside you is where Christmas really starts. So give your heart to Jesus, you'll discover when you do, that it's Christmas, really Christmas, for you."

Los Angeles Times Syndicate