For Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, we will have no posts about economics, politics, or cultural woes. We will just contemplate and celebrate the incarnation of God.
I always find it odd that so many Christians, even, tend to think of God as an abstraction or as someone gazing down from up above. As if He had not come down from Heaven to share our humanness, to suffer with us, to redeem us.
It makes a huge difference to believe in a God who became man. It’s how Christians are different from Muslims and from Deists. Consider the problem of evil. How could God allow so many evils and so much pain in the world? This is a stumbling block to non-believers, and even Christians, of course, often struggle with this questions. But the question assumes a particular view of God, that He is purely transcendent and detached from His creation. But if God became flesh in Jesus Christ, this complicates the question profoundly. This is a God who Himself suffered at the hands of evil men, who Himself experienced physical and emotional pain, who on the Cross was tortured, abandoned, and despaired. More than that, He bore the full brunt and consequences of human evil. He also bore the afflictions of the whole world throughout history. Jesus, true God and true Man, is Immanuel, “God with us.”
So today we will exult in God becoming Man. Helping us will be some poems by G. K. Chesterton. Read these poems. Even if you don’t like poetry, I’d bet you will like these. (Chesterton did not write poems to be puzzles you have to untangle. He is lucid, not obscure.) Then comment on anything in the poems that you found profound, moving, or enlightening. Interspersed with the poems will be other posts about Christmas. So have a blessed Christmas, and my prayer is that this blog will help you to that end!
About Gene Veith
