Have you ever noticed how fear is a prominent theme in the Christmas story?
An angel told Joseph, “Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife”… King Herod was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him…When Zechariah saw the angel, he was terrified, and fear overwhelmed him…The angel said to Mary, “Do not be afraid”…When John, Jesus’ cousin, was circumcised, and his mute father began to speak, fear came over all their neighbors…When the angels came to the shepherds, they were filled with fear.
When you think of Christmas, you probably think of warmth, hope, peacefulness, love, and joy. Or maybe you feel anxious about finding the right gifts for everyone on your list. Or perhaps you experience grief over the loss of people who made past Christmases so special. About the last feeling we would associate with Christmas is “fear.” What is there to be afraid of?
Well, nothing. That’s why the angels said, “Do not be afraid” four times in the biblical stories of Jesus’ birth. There is nothing to fear, but you don’t need to know that unless you feel afraid – unless you are determined, like King Herod, to resist what God is doing, or feel so lowly, like the shepherds, that God’s presence seems threatening. Nevertheless, our familiarity with the Christmas story has so sugarcoated the radical nature of the Incarnation that we have lost the sense of awe and wonder that struck fear in the hearts of those who experienced the first Christmas.
Today, we treat it more like a children’s bedtime story. In truth, it is a very adult story about people living in an occupied land, treated brutally by the occupying army. It is about a young woman being forced to put her pregnancy at great risk by traveling over rocky terrain in her ninth month, and then being denied a warm room where she could give birth in dignity and privacy. It is about God choosing to come to us through the fragility and pangs of childbirth, in circumstances where many newborns would not survive.
It’s pretty tough to cut through all the sentimentality of a department store crèche to get in touch with the stark reality of the first Christmas. But it is not just the rough circumstances of Jesus’ birth that we have smoothed out with years of tradition. It is also the fear of people as powerful as Herod and as poor as the shepherds who realized that everything about their world was about to change, and they had no control over it.
God does not want us to be afraid, but God cannot calm our fears if we have never been afraid – or if we are unwilling to acknowledge or confront our fears. It’s hard to imagine how any of us could truly take a leap of faith or submit to the power of God without – at the very least – a gasp.
©2013 by J. Mark Lawson
Comments