The Christmas Story We Need to Hear
What do you think of when you hear the word “Christmas”? The nativity story, angels, a star, and a stable? A decorated tree, presents, food, and family? Christmas memories can so embed themselves in our psyches that it can be difficult to gain perspective on the actual event. Our expectations of what we want Christmas to be can obscure our appreciation for what we are celebrating. We cling to our childhood memories of Christmas long into adulthood because they form a buffer between us and the harshness of the details involved in the real Christmas story. Our nostalgia also protects us from our own suffering and disappointment, at least for a time.
Today is Christmas, and the stories we tell ourselves matter.
As a mother, I wanted to shield my children from the harder parts of the Christmas story in order to create memories untainted by ugly truths. So we focused on angel choirs, wondering shepherds, and a miraculous star. The familiar details reminded us then, and remind us now, that one day goodness and beauty broke into history to show us the way home. Not to a storybook version of the place we try to create, but to our real home, where the lights are always on in welcome.
But on the other side of that sweet Christmas story was a peasant girl, exhausted and crying out with birth pains, attended by a man shamed by his inability to provide a decent place for God to be born. There was blood and dirt and rags for wrapping. A feeding trough.
Jesus’s coming was magnificent and miraculous. It was also raw, painful, and dangerous. It took decades for me to peel back the layers of culture and nostalgia wrapped so tightly around my understanding of Christmas and begin to think deeply about what took place on that night in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago.
We like to talk about the confirmations given of Christ’s deity in the great temple, as Joseph brought a poor man’s offering. We sing about the foreigners who brought precious gifts. But too often we leave out the midnight escape to a foreign land while the local ruler slaughtered Bethlehem’s baby boys.
We gloss over the harsh, cruel parts of the story because they don’t fit the narrative we want. But aren’t those parts the point of it all? Jesus came because we needed him—need him still, as evil rages around the globe and even in our own backyards.
We need a God who lifts our gaze to the unseen and glorious. We also need a savior who comes to us in the mud and suffering of a fearful and violent world.
Mary smothered her cries as her son was born that night, struggling in the dark stable, not knowing that angel songs filled the skies in the fields down the road. Joseph cradled his son amidst hay and dung, unaware that wise men were on their way, carrying royal gifts.
So too, we live our days unaware of the angels just beyond our vision. We worry and despair, lacking faith for the coming provision. To compensate, we gather our Christmas comforts, holding them close for a few weeks in December. And then we set our New Year’s goals high in an attempt to control our lives in a world spinning ever more dangerously out of tilt.
But the Jesus who was born in the dirt and darkness of that stable is the same Jesus who comes to us in our places of sorrow, sin, and stinging regret. Not in spite of them, but because of them. Not to make us presentable, but to make us his.
Today is Christmas. However we celebrate it, let’s hold close the raw and real truth of a love that battled the darkness to meet us here amid our wrappings and trappings, to rescue us here amid our desperation and despair, to come for us here in our striving for control and longing for peace. This is the day when one small baby divided all human history—and each of our lives—into before and after.
There will come a time when he returns as a mighty king, exercising justice and making all things right and new and beautiful. But for now—now he comes to us as a baby, a servant, a friend walking with us through this space between our need and our home. That’s the real Christmas story we need to hear: Immanuel, God with Us.
Andrea Sanborn is passionate about encouraging others toward a deeper walk with Jesus, where faith finds grounding in hope. She is a member of the GCD Writers’ Guild and has been published in three books, as well as on various websites. She lives in northern Minnesota with her husband and adult son Ben, who has intellectual disabilities and a unique—and often humorous—way of navigating the world. She blogs at andreasanborn.com. You can also find her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.