CHAPTER 8
THE DOCTRINE OF CHRISTMAS
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.
—1 John 1:1–4
When we think about Christmas, we generally turn to passages in the Bible that give us accounts of Jesus’ birth. We want to hear about the angels, Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, and the wise men. The text above, the beginning of the First Epistle of John, doesn’t immediately strike us as a Christmas text, because it is not describing Jesus’ birth. However, though John is not recounting these events, he is giving us a wonderfully concise explanation of what the nativity means.
SALVATION IS BY GRACE
Christmas means that salvation is by grace. Of course we have seen this before, but notice how John explains it here. In chapter 1 of the Gospel of John Jesus is called “the Word”: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). In 1 John 1:1 he is called “the Word of life,” and then Jesus is called “eternal life” in verse 2. When John says, “Eternal life . . . was with the Father and has appeared to us,” he is referring to Jesus Christ himself. This is a startling statement, but the point is clear. We are not being told merely that Jesus Christ has eternal life or even that he gives it. This verse says he is eternal life, salvation itself.
This is one truth that we have found hidden in every Christmas passage. In every other religion the founder points to eternal life, but because Jesus is God come in the flesh, he is eternal life. To unite with him by faith, to know him in love, is to have this life. Period, full stop. There is nothing else for you to achieve or attain.
Over the years I have had people say to me something like this: “I don’t know what I believe about Jesus. I don’t know if I believe in the incarnation or all these dogmas. But really, doctrine doesn’t matter. What matters is that you live a good life.” However, when you say, “Doctrine doesn’t matter; what matters is that you live a good life,” that is a doctrine. It is called the doctrine of salvation by your works rather than by grace. It assumes that you are not so bad that you need a Savior, that you are not so weak that you can’t pull yourself together and live as you should. You are actually espousing a whole set of doctrines about the nature of God, humanity, and sin. And the message of Christmas is that they are all wrong.
You may believe that you can earn your right to heaven with God, or you may reject religion altogether and believe you simply have the moral resources within yourself to live the life a human being ought to live. If you hold either position, however, your life will be characterized by fear and insecurity, because you will never feel like you are being quite good enough; or it will be marked by pride and disdain for other people if you feel like you actually have been good enough; or it will be marked by self-loathing if you feel you have failed. You may find yourself whiplashed back and forth between two or more of these ways of life.
There is another possibility, however. You can believe in the truth of Christmas, that you are saved by grace alone through faith in Christ alone. Then you can get an identity that is humbled out of your pride but affirmed and loved out of your insecurity, and one that offers you forgiveness and restoration when you fail.
BECAUSE CHRISTMAS REALLY HAPPENED
This all shows us how important it is that the Christmas stories actually happened. If we are saved through our efforts, then stories about Jesus have just one function: to inspire us to imitate him and follow his example. It doesn’t matter if the stories are fiction or not. What’s important is that they give us examples to live by. But if we are saved by grace, not by what we do but by what he has done, then it is crucial that the great events of the Gospels—the incarnation, the atonement on the cross, and the resurrection from the dead—actually occurred in time and space.
That is what this text confirms. John says, “We saw him with our eyes; we heard him with our ears; we touched him with our hands.” Why is he being so emphatic? Is it just a rhetorical flourish? No. Robert Yarbrough, a New Testament scholar, says that the verbs correspond to the varieties of witness attestation in ancient jurisprudence. And so when John writes, “We have seen it and testify to it”—and then speaks of hearing, seeing, and touching—“he is not making conversation but virtually swearing a deposition.”1 This is court language. John is saying, “This is not just a set of nice stories. Many others and I were eyewitnesses. We testify to it. We really saw him. He really lived; he really died; he really rose from the dead.”
If Christmas is just a nice legend, in a sense you are on your own. But if Christmas is true—and John says that it absolutely is true—then you can be saved by grace.
FELLOWSHIP WITH GOD IS POSSIBLE
Verses 1 and 2 are a kind of court deposition that Christmas really happened. John is insisting on the truth of the angels’ proclamation that the divine Savior was born in Bethlehem. Then in verses 3 and 4 he moves on to describe the goal of that proclamation.
Christmas means you can have fellowship with God. John wants his readers to believe in his testimony so they can enter fellowship with those who have fellowship with the Father and the Son (verse 3). The word used here, koinonia, means a relationship of mutual sharing. Our word “communion” conveys this idea of deep, intimate, multidimensional bonding. John is saying that believers can enter into the same personal communion with God that the apostles and others had who saw and knew Jesus personally.
Over the years I’ve had fruitful dialogues with many members and leaders of other religions. I have asked them how in their faith the individual’s relationship with God actually works. In general, these are the answers I received. Eastern religions do not grant the possibility of personal communion. God is in the end an impersonal force, and you can merge with that force but cannot have personal communication with it. For other world faiths God is personal, but too removed to be said to have intimate, loving communion with believers. I’ve become convinced that what makes the difference for Christianity is the incarnation. No other faith says God became flesh. Think about that great phrase from Charles Wesley’s Christmas hymn—“veiled in flesh, the Godhead see.”
When Moses asked to see God’s glory, he was told it would kill him, yet in John 1 we are told that, through Jesus, “we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father . . . full of grace and truth” (John 1:14, King James Version). Charles Wesley did not write, “veiled in flesh, the Godhead hidden” but “veiled in flesh, the Godhead see.” Science teachers instruct their classes to look through filters in order to see the sun and its features without damaging their eyes. In a similar way, it is through the person Christ that we see the glory of God.
If you want to know God personally, you cannot just believe general truths about him or say your prayers to him. You must immerse yourself in the Gospel texts. When you read the Gospels, you are seeing God in human form. We see God’s perfections in ways that we can relate to. We see his love, his humility, his brilliance, his wisdom, and his compassion. But they are no longer abstractions. We see them in all their breathtaking, real-life forms. You can know the glories of God from the Old Testament, so overwhelming and daunting, but in Jesus Christ they come near. He becomes graspable, palpable. He becomes above all personal, someone with whom to have a relationship.
Christmas and the incarnation mean that God went to infinite lengths to make himself one whom we can know personally.
What does this actually look like? Daniel Steele, a British Methodist minister in the eighteenth century, once wrote about a season in his life: “Almost every week, and sometimes almost every day, the pressure of his great love comes down on my heart in such a measure as to make . . . my whole being, soul and body, groan beneath the strain of the almost unsupportable plethora of joy. And yet amid this fullness there is a hunger for more. . . . He has unlocked every apartment of my being and filled and flooded them all with the light of his radiant presence. . . . The spot before untouched has been reached, and all its flintiness has melted in the presence of . . . Jesus, the One altogether lovely.”2
Notice that this minister is talking not about his ordinary prayer life but about an unusually rich season in his life in which he experienced a depth of personal communion with God that startled and transformed him. This is not the ordinary experience of any Christian, even the strongest. I quote it to show what is possible, and according to 1 John 1:1–4, it is possible because of the incarnation. Jesus has become the mediator who has broken down the barriers. This is the kind of fellowship with God that we now can have.
Do you know anything of this? Can we describe our prayer lives as participating in rich communion with God? The incarnation, Christmas, means that God is not content to be a concept or just someone you know from a distance. Do what it takes to get close to him. Christmas is a challenge as well as a promise about fellowship with God.
SO WE CAN HAVE JOY
Christmas means joy—“glad tidings of great joy.” Here in verse 4, the passage ends on the same note. John is saying, “My joy will not be complete until you have the same joy in fellowship with God that we do.” The idea of joy is important in the writings of John. In John 16:22 Jesus promises that his followers’ joy will be unshakable, because the “full measure” of Christ’s own joy will be reproduced in us (John 17:13)—a remarkable prospect.
The joy of which the New Testament speaks is, of course, happiness. But it is not the kind that is a fizziness or giddiness that goes away in the face of negative circumstances. It is more like the ballast that keeps a ship stable and upright in the water. In the last volume of The Lord of the Rings, there is a moment in which the future looks hopelessly bleak. The wizard Gandalf seems to be crushed under the weight of the world. Then suddenly he laughs, and it is revealed that despite all the “care and sorrow” he is experiencing, underneath it all there is “a great joy, a fountain of mirth enough to set a kingdom laughing, were it to gush forth.”3
When we lived in Philadelphia, we bought a home on the side of a hill. In fact, the whole community there was originally called “Hillside.” We noticed that, no matter how hot and dry the weather got in the summer, it was always cool and moist in our basement. We wondered about it until one of the longtime residents of the neighborhood told us that there was a subterranean stream of water that ran down the side of the mountain, just under the foundations of our homes. Even when there was a drought and agonizing heat, in our basement it was always cool and comfortable. Psalm 1 uses this same image to describe the godly man or woman, who is like a tree not dependent on rainwater because its roots are near a river of life (Psalm 1:3).
The joy that Christmas brings, the assurance of God’s love and care, is like a subterranean river of joy, a fountain of mirth, that will always reinvigorate you no matter the circumstances of your life.
THROUGH ORDINARY MEANS
I would like to argue that we often fail to experience this Christian joy because the means to achieving it are so ordinary.
The claim in 1 John 1:1 that “our hands have touched” him never ceases to amaze. How could the infinite become that finite, the extraordinary become that ordinary? Yet that is the very heart of the Christmas message—unimaginable greatness was packed into a manger. “Our God contracted to a span; incomprehensibly made man.”4 The world can’t comprehend it. It wants spectacle. And so it is the greatest irony that Christmas is the one Christian holiday the world seems to embrace, yet its message is the most incomprehensible to that world. Jesus was born not in a civic arena but in a stable. He did not go to live in a palace but was immediately made a homeless refugee. The guests at his birth were not A-listers but shepherds. My wife once heard a Christian speaker tell this story. During the halftime of a football game, he watched the Blue Angels precision flying team perform their daredevil feats at supersonic speed over the stadium. At the end a helicopter flew them from their landing field to the 50 yard line, where they disembarked to wild cheering, dressed in silver flight suits with zippers from shoulders to boots. The speaker observed, “If I were God sending my son into the world, that’s how I would have done it—with spectacular special effects, a cheering crowd, and of course those silver flight suits. But that is not how God did it.” At every point Jesus defied the world’s expectations for how celebrities should act and how social movements should begin. The world cannot comprehend a God like Jesus.
The Christmas message itself participates in this ordinariness and commonness so offensive to the world. When I was a new young pastor in a small town in Virginia, there were a number of dilapidated homes and trailers surrounding our church, inhabited by people who were poor and who had many social and personal problems. Occasionally one person would say to me that it was wrong for our more middle-class church to hold its services in the midst of that neighborhood without reaching out to the residents. One day a deacon in our church and I walked across our church’s parking lot to visit a woman who lived in a rented house. She was a single mother whose broken relationships with men had left her impoverished, depressed, living somewhat in disgrace in that conservative, traditional community, and raising her children with almost no help or support. We sat down and had a long talk about the Gospel, the glad tidings, and she responded with joy to the message. She trusted in Christ.
I came back to see her about a week later, but when we sat down she burst into tears. That week she had called up her sister to tell about her conversation with me and about her new faith, but she had been laughed at.
“My sister said, ‘Let me get this straight. This preacher told you that a person like you could do all the foolish, immoral things you have done all your life, and five minutes before you die, you can just repent and trust Jesus and be saved just like that? He told you that you don’t have to live a really good life to go to heaven? That’s offensive. It’s too simple; it’s too easy. I’ll never believe that! And you shouldn’t either.’” Her sister thought that salvation had to be a great feat achieved by noble, moral deeds. It couldn’t be something you just asked for. The ordinariness of the Gospel had offended her pride. I told the weeping woman that her assurance and comfort were not unfounded. We went to the Bible and studied until she saw clearly that Christ came in weakness and smallness to save not the proud but those who admit that they also are weak, small, and need a Savior. Her joy returned. The ancient tidings of Christmas still make people glad.
The Christian life begins not with high deeds and achievements but with the most simple and ordinary act of humble asking. Then the life and joy grow in us over the years through commonplace, almost boring practices. Daily obedience, reading and prayer, worship attendance, serving our brothers and sisters in Christ as well as our neighbors, depending on Jesus during times of suffering. And bit by bit our faith will grow, and the foundation of our lives will come closer to that deep river of joy.
Don’t be put off by the ordinariness of the means of joy, for in that ordinariness is hidden the extraordinary riches of the Gospel. Don’t make the mistake that the world has always made. Instead, remember:
How silently, how silently
The wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of His heaven.
No ear may hear His coming,
But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive him still,
The dear Christ enters in.5