For many of us, the main theme of why God became man was in order to teach. But as soon as we look into the New Testament or any other Christian writing we will find that they are constantly talking about something different - about the death of Christ and His coming to life again. It is obvious that his birth and teachings are important points but the chief point of the story lies here; the main thing He came to earth to do was to suffer and be killed. Therefore, while we must commemorate His birth, we should not be blind-sided as to miss the point of it all - he came to be killed. This is why in the season of Christmas filled with joy and celebration there is also a certain level of pain and discomfort that comes with it.
We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is Christianity and that is what has to be believed, even if we do not understand it. We may ask what good it will be to us if we do not understand it but that is easily answered. A woman can eat her dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes her. A child may swallow his medicine without understanding how a few pills will stop a throbing headache. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it. It is a mystery. But a mystery is not something that cannot be understood, it is in fact, something that cannot be fully understood because its meaning is inexhaustible and we can indeed understand something about the mystery of the Incarnation.
It is a matter of common experience that, when one person has got himself into a hole, the trouble of getting him out usually falls on a kind friend. Now what was the sort of "hole" we had got ourselves into? We had tried to set up on our own, to behave as if we belonged to ourselves. In other words, fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature, like a "Made in Aba" product, who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realizing that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor - that is the only way out of this "hole." This process of surrender - this movement full speed astern - is what Christianity calls repentance.
Now I do not know about you, but repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than eating pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of ourselves, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person - and he would not need it. The same badness which makes us need repentance makes us unable to do it. We can only do it if God helps us. But what do we mean when we talk of God helping us?
We mean God putting into us a bit of Himself - so to speak. He lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another. When you teach a child writing, you hold his hand while he forms the letters: that is, he forms the letters because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hearts and minds while we do it. Unfortunately we now need God's help in order to do something which God, in His own nature, never does at all - to surrender, to repent, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God's nature corresponds to these processes at all. God can share only what He has: these things, in His own nature, He has not. This bleak future is really how the Old Testament looks and why animal sacrifices had to be made regularly.
But supposing God became a man - suppose our human nature which can repent and suffer and die was amalgamated with God's nature in one person - then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God's dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God's dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all. This is the reason God became man. Every Christmas-Christian must therefore be a Lenten-Christian. It is therefore not a coincidence that the day after Christmas is the day we commemorate the martyrdom of St. Stephen because in his death, we see why God became man.
Therefore, through the intercession of St. Stephen, may we be able to die daily to ourselves for the sake of Jesus our Redeemer. We pray through the same Christ our Lord - Amen.
Merry Christmas!
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