Receiving the Gift of Christmas

In the second chapter of Luke, an angel appears to shepherds during the night watch to share with them what has happened.  

… for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.

Luke 2:11 RSV

The words shared with them reach us as well.  A savior is born for us.  This is the gift we are being given.  The prayers found in the liturgies that get closer to Christmas refer to our salvation about to be born.  In this child that is born and given to us is our salvation.  In other words, we know what Jesus grows up to do and how He gives of himself completely to redeem us.  Yet before Jesus grew up and did those things, He was born and placed in a manger.

This brings me to a story.  Several weeks before Christmas, I had made an order for some ornaments I saw online.  They were beautiful globe-shaped ornaments with an image of the nativity within the globe.  After several weeks of waiting, the ornaments came.  As I opened the package containing the whole order, it became clear that I was not getting what I thought.  They were less globe-shaped than I pictured, among other things.  Any further details aside, the point was that these did not live up to my expectations.

After cooling down from the whole experience, something about the ornaments struck me.  Just as certain things about them did not meet my expectations of what I thought they should look like, so the actual nativity must have been.  Even though the ornaments did not look like what I had first thought, they still had the nativity of Christ on them.  Jesus’ nativity happened in a similar fashion.  The King of kings was born in the most unlikely conditions, in many ways, conditions that were not what one would expect either.

It then occurred to me that this can apply to everything else about Christ.  We know through Scripture that He was not what many expected; thus, many of His critics in the Gospel accounts.  There were times when great numbers walked away from Him because what He said was too much or too hard.  Multiple times, many tried to trip Him up in His own words.  Others call to mind that this teacher is the son of an ordinary carpenter.  Jesus did not meet other people’s expectations.

The other side of this is how often do we fall into the same perception with expectations?  

Jesus comes into the world to be our savior.  Whether it is like me and my ornaments or the people in the Scriptures, we tend to overlook Him because something doesn’t fit our expectations.  These expectations can be from how we think God should answer our prayers to how He should intervene or not intervene in our lives.  Many times, we get so hung up on something that we forget that Jesus was born for us, becoming one like us (except for sin, of course).  Jesus comes into the ordinary elements of our lives.  Just as His nativity was not all flashy but incredibly simple and unexpected, He comes into the simple and unexpected parts of our lives.

One of the ways that He enters our lives is through His own words that come to us through the Gospel accounts.  Just as the angel’s words about a savior being born for us reach us here and now, the words of Jesus reach us more so.  As we hear the disciples being invited to follow Him, we hear Him asking us to follow.  As we hear Christ explaining the parables to his disciples, we hear the explanation being given to us.  As they are told what the greatest commandment is, or to love as He has loved, it is also directed to us.  It is in our listening to what Christ says and living it that we receive the gift of Himself that was born for us on that first Christmas.  

For we know the converse is true, that when we purposefully do not listen or refuse to live as He has taught and commanded, we reject the gift of Himself.  He was not born for us so we could get time off from work or have a reason to get together with family.  He was born to be our savior.  Receiving Christ on Christmas is to receive all that He instructs and teaches as that savior.