I have long understood that the Christmas season, so full of joy and hope, also so full of depression and despair, represented in our culture a sort of hope of Heaven. We speak of joy and celebrate life together and, indeed, we often experience joy during this season. We also portray a collective vision of life and relationships that is well beyond the reality most people experience, thus leading to bouts of depression over broken relationships or the pain of remembering the loved ones who have passed on and are unable to celebrate with us.
So Christmas serves in our culture as a metaphor for Heaven, eliciting happiness or despair and most often a mix of both. For the believer, there is ultimately hope as they face the world’s brokenness and “set their hope on the grace to be given them on the day of Christ Jesus.” (1 Peter 1:13)
What I don’t think I ever realized is just how biblical this is. As I’m going through an Advent reading plan, it suddenly struck me that the Old Testament passages we read which point us towards the coming of Jesus are inextricably mingled with prophecies of the end times. Commentaries are full of helpful explanations to guide us to understand which prophecies are talking about his birth and which are talking about his return in the last days. Of course, this wouldn’t be necessary if it were not so difficult to keep it straight in our heads as we are reading it. The coming of the Messiah, as great as it was and is, simply isn’t complete until he returns to eradicate sin and make all things new.
Therefore, our reflection on the birth of Christ rightly produces both true joy and deep unfulfilled longing at the same time. We rejoice that the prophets were correct when speaking of the coming of Jesus. On this side of history we can celebrate the salvation that even we Gentiles experience in the here and now through the grace Jesus purchased on the cross. We also have the joy of knowing we will be with God forever on a new Earth that will be infinitely more beautiful than any Norman Rockwell or Thomas Kinkade painting would lead us to imagine. And yet this is no reason to strip away all of the experiences that fall short of the reality. On the contrary, we should embrace the imperfect visualizations of a perfect world, knowing full well that, as we wrap our arms around it, there may be thorns on the other side. As we do this, we should remember the great hope that Jesus has brought into the world and into our lives, in particular. We should also remember that our citizenship lies elsewhere, in a perfect kingdom which will be consummated only with our Lord’s return.
Dec. 1, 2017
David Parks 