Christmas, Immanuel, and How Existence Might Be Ok After All
This Christmas has given my family a unique experience of the advent story. My sister-in-law is with child and very far along—so much so that it’s imaginable the child could be here on Christmas day. There’s a natural excitement among the family; my mom is finally getting a granddaughter, my nephew a little sibling. The house is nested and ready for the newest member to arrive. It’s all filled with hope, love, and a sense of a new and good thing.
The timing of it all has caused me to ponder what it must have been like for Mary. Just as we wait for the new thing that is about to happen, the expanding of the family and the new opportunity for love, Mary waited for her baby, her new and good thing.
But still, Mary had a tough go of it; she was summoned on a long journey back to Bethlehem for a census, she was likely gossipped about in her community for being pregnant outside of marriage. On top of all this, in her time of labor, there was no room for her at the inn. She gives birth, not in a hospital with 21st-century medical care, but in a cold and dirty stable. She wraps her newborn in swaddling clothes and sets him in a feeding trough, probably shooing aside donkeys, cows, and horses from the baby Jesus. We sing about the silent, holy, peaceful night, but I have to imagine there was also great pain, fear, and distress in this moment.
Undoubtedly Mary rejoiced at the coming of her child and what she knew of his life to come—it was certainly a joyous day. And yet, intimately tied within it is the messy humanness of it all. Fear and anxiety for things to come, physical discomfort, loud baby cries, and bad nights of sleep: it was all there, and yet God was there among it all too.
Christmas time is often encouraging for me. I have faced periods in life where faith seemed difficult. I’m a sensitive soul, and the great pains and sufferings of life can leave me world-weary. Sometimes the psalms of lament feel like the only true words in the whole book, and I need some glimpse of the hope that God cares for those in the midst of even the most extreme human suffering. I need hope, love, and a sense of a new and good thing.
The Christmas story portrays God as Immanuel: God with us, God here among us. Immanuel shows God being there in the throws of life on earth, all mixed in with you and me as we try to get through our days.
Mary must have sat with Joseph in that dirty stable—still exhausted from birth and uncertain about the travel to come, and looked upon her baby with joy. In him, she would know that God was there with her, and he had been with her, and he would be with her in all the pains and joys that would come in the following years. This knowledge offered no immediate solutions or quick fixes to the complications of her human life, and yet it was real, and it was present, and it offered the hope that existence itself might be ok.
I think of Mary and of the Immanuel in the Christmas season. There is much it does not offer me: solutions to all circumstantial problems, complete relief from the things that bother me, an immediate righting of all that is wrong in the universe. But it does offer me the hope that God’s nature is to be here with me, and he is here in a particular way for those who are distressed, hurt, downcast, and wounded. God is with us, and that brings comfort now. It also brings hope that someday, somehow, everything will be as it was intended to be.
