Wonder of wonders, the infinite God became one of us! He was born to a poor Jewish teenage girl whose family would have been horribly shamed, but lucky for them and for her, was hastily married under questionable circumstances. What a strange way for the Son of God to enter the earth!
I read Anne Rice’s Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt when it came out last Christmas, and it stayed with me. I didn’t agree with it all, especially the parts where Jesus as a child did miracles (more like magic tricks) but it did a good job of making Jesus human, something that’s tough to do. He had feelings, emotions, human emotions. Sometimes he was sad, sometimes he was puzzled. He had relatives, brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts. But he lived this life without sin, amazing. I’m re-reading it again, starting today!
Brian’s message at church was good today–it’s going to stay with me too, I can tell. How the Pharisees wanted to divide people up into two groups, the good people and the bad people. (Of course, the good people were them!) Their idea of holiness was to separate themselves (the good people) from the rest of the world (the bad people). Jesus condemned them! Constantly! He was a friend of sinners, and he embraced the whole world…..”for God SO LOVED the world!”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author of what many call the most important book of the 20th century, The Gulag Archipelago, expressed it this way: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and then all human hearts…and even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains….an unuprooted small corner of evil.”
So who’s a Pharisee? Surely not ME! Surely not us! We’re the good guys, right? “Those Pharisees”….surely we’re not like THEM! And so we once again find ourselves pointing the condemning finger. How quickly we forget the lessons we’ve learned, how quickly we sink back into spiritual pride.
No, I think, on the contrary, there’s a little bit of Pharisee in every one of us! Jesus didn’t spend such a huge chunk of his time correcting a small segment of society, but all of mankind. He left us not with the task of picking the splinters out of our brother’s eyes, but to become aware of the logs we have in our own. It’s a lifelong process, not an event that occurs because we pray a particular prayer or respond to an altar call or have a particular church affiliation.
But through that process, we are changed. We come to realize, like G.K. Chesterton did a hundred years ago, that what is wrong with this world is ME! The Pharisee thinks it’s everyone else, but the truth is it’s ME! I need to be changed. I need to be transformed. And I am changing, being transformed, becoming like the One who came as an example and laid down His life. There is no greater thrill in the world than to become who you were always meant to be, something that’s only possible because two thousand years ago Christmas came to earth.
Merry Christmas, everyone!