Happy Christmas!

At Christmas we celebrate that God took on flesh in the person of his Son, being born in a shed in a nowhere town outside of Jerusalem. In celebrating Jesus' birth we celebrate very humble beginnings, but we do so in the light of all that has been accomplished through his life and death. Therefore, in celebrating the birth of Jesus we also celebrate our new birth, because on that first Christmas, everything began to change. In the birth of his Son, God's plan to give birth to a new humanity was set in motion. Perhaps the best language for this is recreation. The fact that John's Gospel begins by echoing the opening words of Genesis (In the beginning...), suggests that in Jesus, God is going about his work of recreation. Recreation is then affirmed a few chapters later when Jesus tells Nicodemus that he needs to be born again (or born from above). Something new is taking place in and around Jesus!

To fully grasp hold of this we have to remember that we cannot separate or compartmentalise the different parts of the story of Jesus. His birth, his life, his death and his resurrection all belong together in the one story of God's engagement with the world he so loves. Therefore in celebrating the beginning of Jesus' earthly life (his incarnation), we also celebrate all that followed (his death and resurrection). We need to be wary of focussing all our attention on the cross in such a way that forgets or diminishes the incarnation. The incarnation was not simply the means to the end of the atonement. Instead, as Julian of Norwich once stated, the atonement secured the end of the incarnation, which was the ontological recreation of our humanity. Through the death of Christ (which she described as the ‘labour pains’ of the cross), the old humanity is put to death in order that a new humanity might be born. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:17, ‘if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!’

Therefore as we celebrate God's extravagant love in the giving of his only begotten Son to be born in 'sinful flesh', we also celebrate that in his death that flesh has been defeated in order that new life may emerge. Put simply, for those in Christ, the birth of Jesus is cause to celebrate our own rebirth - we are now sons and daughters of the one true King.

Oh, and by the way, Happy Christmas!