The Hopes and Fears of All the Years: Day Two

Christmas is an Inside Job

O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel
that mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to you, O Israel.
- from the hymn O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

Text: Matthew 1:18-25

Christmas is one of the most sentimental times of the year, isn’t it? We pull the decorations out of storage, we listen to the same songs we’ve known since childhood, and suddenly the whole world smells like cinnamon and nostalgia. There’s nothing wrong with any of that. Tradition grounds us. In fact, I quite enjoy all of it! It’s because Christmas carries such deep sentiment, however, that it’s easy to assume that the biblical story is offering the same thing. A cozy moment. A silent night. Something safe, soft, and perfectly gift-wrapped.

That’s not the story we find in the New Testament.
Matthew isn’t writing Hallmark Channel theology.
When he tells his story of Jesus’s birth he doesn’t use warm and fuzzy images or language. That’s not the world he knew, nor was it the world Jesus entered. He’s inviting us to look deeper than the overly-sanitized version of Christmas we’ve inherited, beyond the glitter and tinsel, to notice the radical claims he’s making about Jesus—as God-with-us.

This “God-with-us” makes his entrance into a story already marked by tension and vulnerability: a young couple navigating an unexpected pregnancy, rumor and speculation no doubt following them, and with the threat of empire as a daily reality to navigate. It was in that context that Jesus, God-with-us, entered the human story, the child of socially compromised parents, from the peasant class, who worked hard to survive on the underside of power.

Matthew seems to be nudging us: If you want to find God, don’t look up. Look around. Emmanuel is not about a God watching over humanity from a distance, but about the revolutionary idea that God has always met humanity wearing our skin and breathing our air.

This is solidarity, not superiority.
Participation, not observation.
Presence, not power.

This reorientation of where we find God reframes our own calling, too. If God shows up in vulnerability, then an Emmanuel-shaped faith calls us to move in that same way in the world. Like Jesus, we are not swooping in as heroes from the outside, but standing in solidarity with one another as neighbors. Divine presence becomes most real and tangible when we choose to show up for and with one another—especially alongside those whom our systems too often ignore at best, and intentionally harm at worst.

“God-with-us” is a disruptive kind of closeness, the kind that pulls us toward compassion and seeing our shared humanity with every person. Emmanuel means that God is found right in the middle of the mess, and invites us to join the work of showing up there too. The good news of Christmas is that God doesn’t come to us from somewhere else, but from within the human family. It turns out Christmas is an inside job.

Reflection:
What does practicing “Emmanuel” look like in your actual life today? Not just in grand gestures, but in small, faithful acts of showing up?