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Unexpected gifts of the Christmas story
Reflections
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| By KAREN OSBORNE
21 December, 2008 |
What’s Christmas going to look like in your house this year?
Will there be bright tinsel, blinking lights, the whole family home for the holidays and every present you ever wanted, tied with a bow and left under the tree?
Probably not.
God isn’t Santa Claus.
People place a lot of emphasis on having “the best Christmas ever.”
This usually includes buying expensive electronics, cooking traditional family recipes and cleaning the house so the relatives don’t scoff.
As kids, “the best Christmas ever” had a lot to do with how accurate Santa Claus was in fulfilling every wish we had on our Christmas list.
Grownups know the truth about Santa Claus, but there’s still enough of the dreamy romance of a childhood Christmas morning left that we still expect Christmas to be like winning the lottery.
Teenagers are also learning that, for many reasons, more people are depressed around the Christmas-New Year holidays than at any other point in the year.
Nobody in the Christmas story got what they were wishing for either. Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the Wise Men – all of them got handed something completely unexpected.
There would have been a lynch mob running after Santa if he’d given “presents” like those.
Mary’s present could have killed her. Not only was being unmarried and pregnant socially unacceptable in first-century Israel, it was also a crime.
If he had wanted to, Joseph could have had Mary stoned to death for adultery; he did consider divorce.
On top of that, can you imagine the nasty things that people might have said behind Mary’s back? Teenagers, in particular, know how bad that feels.
There wasn’t much tinsel and bon-bons for Mary.
The shepherds were having a “silent night,” doing their jobs as they always did, when they were suddenly scared out of their wits by a “multitude of angels” in the sky.
One moment they heard crickets and silence; the next, they saw hundreds of heavenly beings streaming bright light, singing psalms and requiring the shepherds to leave their flocks, go into town and search for a baby none of them had ever heard of before. That’s not a Christmas present. That’s a heart attack.
How would you like to “wish upon a star” and be informed by that star that you were required to leave your cushy and prestigious government job as a Persian wise man, sit on the back of a camel for a few hundred kilometres’ hard journey across the mountains and the desert, all the while lugging heavy presents for a child who may or may not exist in a country where the king was plotting to kill you.
Not exactly a sleigh ride.
God has a really funny idea of what is supposed to be on a Christmas list.
On the surface, the Christmas story is a story of everything gone wrong, a series of seemingly unfortunate events that really messed up the participants’ expectations of how their lives were going to unfold.
But that’s how God chose to save the world, not through trumpets blaring, fireworks or superheroics, but through something completely unexpected: an ordinary baby from an ordinary family in a backwater town.
So when things go wrong this Christmas – and they will-– just think of that tiny, crying baby.
The best Christmas ever is waiting for you.
Karen Osborne is a CNS columnist.
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