Some buoyant personalities can celebrate Christmas even in hard seasons of life, seemingly unfazed. But for others, all the talk of joy and merriment at Christmas can make our sorrows feel all the more acute and our pains all the more painful. Normal life is hard enough. It’s even harder when all the world seems to be singing, ringing bells, and pretending everything’s suddenly merry.
"The pressure to feel the joy of Christmas can make joy all the more difficult."
The pressure to feel the joy of Christmas can make joy all the more difficult. The real Christmas, however, does not ignore our pain. When we open the pages of Scripture and turn to that first Christmas, we find, without doubt, that all was not merry and bright. The new glimpses of merriness that do emerge fall against a backdrop of misery and disorder. Those first rays of brightness shone in a land of deep darkness.
First, consider Mary. Doubtless much excitement and anticipation came with the angel’s announcement—along with great confusion and misunderstanding. Soon she would be showing. She was betrothed but unmarried. Soon the watching eyes of her native Nazareth would make her the subject of their whispering and judgments. Even three decades later, her son’s enemies would play the card when outmaneuvered: “We were not born of sexual immorality” (John 8:41). If Jesus couldn’t leave such rumors behind, then even less could Mary.
And consider Joseph. His betrothed “was found to be with child” before their marriage. What disgrace would have attended this news for him? How deeply hurt must he have felt to find her pregnant? She had seemed so wonderful, so chaste, so favored by God. What dreams were certainly shattered? What turmoil he must have faced, for however long those hours and days dragged on between learning of her pregnancy and the angel later appearing to him in a dream, appealing to him to “take Mary as [his] wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 1:20). Joseph trusted the angel’s words, but he must have had his momentary lapses. And word of his dream wouldn’t have stopped the gossip around town.
Reflections for Advent that help us to lift our eyes to the wonder of the incarnation and worship Jesus.
More significant than Joseph’s or Mary’s pain, however, is the pain and sin and suffering and ruin for which Jesus came. The angel declared to Joseph, “You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). Every Jew agreed that God’s people needed saving—from Roman occupation and dominion, that is.
The coming of Christ was at least a reminder of their political subjugation to pagan Gentiles. But the angel’s announcement to Joseph didn’t even mention Rome. God’s first-covenant people indeed needed saving—from their own sins: from the darkness and corruption within them.
If God’s people, not to mention the nations, weren’t needy—and desperately so—there would have been no Christmas. Christ did not come to put on a show or make a cameo appearance in history. He came to bring life to the dead, to rescue the perishing, to heal the sick, to destroy the works of the devil. For centuries, misery and darkness had been compounded. Only in coming to save such a depraved and disfigured world would his arrival signal hope for any real merriment and brightness.
Yet the relief of our pain would come through his. Mary must have experienced a shock when she presented her newborn son in the temple. An old man named Simeon declared his sense that this child was the Christ, but then he turned to look Mary in the eye and spoke to her a sobering prophetic word:
“Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also), so that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.” (Luke 2:34-35)
Her child being the Christ would not mean immunity from controversy, enemies, and great pain—but precisely the opposite. And Mary herself would have “a sword... pierce through [her] own soul also.”
What could this mean but that some great tragedy was appointed? Could her own soul be pierced by anything other than his premature death?
The earthly life that began at Christmas was not to be an easy one: not at birth, not in infancy, not in adulthood. Isaiah had prophesied that the Christ would be despised and rejected, and he was; that he would be a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and indeed he was (Isaiah 53:3). But this life, painful and challenging as it would be, was not unacquainted with the deep, deep joy that could sustain the man of sorrows.
"We may be overwhelmingly sorrowful at Christmas, and yet, in Christ, by his Spirit, God can give us the resilience to rejoice."
Christmas doesn’t ignore our many pains; neither does it bid us wallow in them. Christmas takes them seriously—more seriously than any secular celebration can—and reminds us that our God has seen our pain and heard our cries for help (as in Exodus 2:23-25; 3:7-9; 6:5), and he himself has come to deliver us.
Christmas, at its best, gives us a peek of the uncompromised joy that is coming, and as we glimpse it, even from afar, we have a foretaste. Like the apostle Paul, and the man of sorrows himself, we are “sorrowful yet always rejoicing” (2 Corinthians 6:10).
We may be overwhelmingly sorrowful at Christmas, and yet, in Christ, by his Spirit, God can give us the resilience to rejoice.
This is an extract The Christmas We Didn't Expect, a new Advent devotional from David Mathis, executive editor for Desiring God. These reflections help us to lift our eyes to wonder of the incarnation and worship the one who came to save us and make our futures certain. The following extract is a devotion for the eighteenth of December.
David Mathis serves as executive editor at desiringGod.org, pastor at Cities Church, and adjunct professor at Bethlehem College and Seminary. He and his wife, Megan, have four children.