We are full throttle into Christmas season, so I’m sure you’ve heard by now about the usual refrain from Christians like me that Jesus is the reason for the season while we lament how everything seems to have become secularized with Santa Claus and Frosty the Snowman.
But I want to take a little bit of your time to unpack the significance of what Christians mean when we say “Jesus is the reason for the season.”
Maybe you’re not familiar with the finer details, or maybe you are a believer, but like me, could use the reminder of how truly profound Christmas is.
When we say “Jesus is the reason for the season,” what we’re talking about is that Christmas — as its name implies — is first and foremost about the birth of Christ.
The first chapter of the Gospel of John explains the theological importance of this.
Referring to God as “the Word,” John writes, “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)
What John is talking about is what we call the “Incarnation” — stemming from a Latin term meaning to become flesh. The Incarnation is God becoming man.
Jesus’ birth was the single moment in all of time when God, the Creator of the universe, took on the form of something He created. Before that, God existed in such a way that no human could ever see Him in all of His glory.
It’s the Incarnation that sets Christianity apart from other religions. All religions are about humans trying to find some way to reach up to God or become a god or attain some sort of spiritual transcendence. But Christianity is about God reaching down to man — and He accomplished that through the person of Jesus Christ, who is fully God and fully man.
So why was it important that God became man?
The Bible teaches that after God created the world and made man in His own image, Adam and Eve disobeyed His command, which corrupted human nature and passed sin along to all of mankind.
Sin entering the world created a bit of a paradoxical problem for humanity.
Athanasius sums it up fairly concisely in a small work titled On the Incarnation.
He writes, “For God would not be true if, after saying that we would die, the human being did not die. On the other hand, it was improper that what had once been made rational and partakers of His Word should perish, and once again return to non-being through corruption.”
God had told Adam that if he was disobedient he would “surely die.” Death was the consequence of sin. And as a perfect God, God must be perfectly just and completely faithful to His Word, so death had to be the consequence—no questions asked.
But God had also created Adam and Eve differently than everything else He created. He created humans in His image. He literally breathed life into Adam. There was fellowship between God and man. To simply let His special creation see corruption and death without the hope of redemption would also go against His merciful nature.
So how could there be death, yet not be death? That was the paradox of sin. And that is the biggest problem that the Incarnation resolves.
Only the death of a person who is completely perfect and blameless could cover the punishment that all of humanity faces for our sin. But only God could be sinless.
Paul writes in Romans, “For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.” (Romans 5:19)
That one man who made the many righteous is Jesus Christ.
By God becoming man, being born of a virgin, living life without sin, He was able to bear the our punishment of death upon the cross, and then conquer death for all by rising from the grave three days later.
It is the Incarnation — God becoming man — that was able to resolve the paradox of how God could be completely just and be completely merciful in redeeming humanity from our fallen nature.
I love the way G.K. Chesterton explains the beautiful nature of the cross that is beyond our ability to fully comprehend.
He compares the inward focus of Buddhism to a circle and contrasts that with Christianity and the shape of the cross.
In Orthodoxy, Chesterton writes, “For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed forever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its center it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers.”
All of the religions about us trying to reach up to God on our own are like the circle. We can try to fix ourselves from our fallen, sinful human nature as much as we can, but we’re bound to our own strength — so we just end up failing over and over again.
But Christianity is like the cross. It says we can’t fix ourselves, but we don’t have to because Christ did. It’s not bound to anything because it’s about God — it’s about His infinite justice, His infinite mercy, and His infinite strength.
And the cross keeps its arms open for everyone.
Jesus says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)