Christ is nearer than you think

Christmas will be different this year.

Changes, disruptions and difficulties have marked this year, and now we turn the corner towards a Christmas season that will, for many of us, be one more cruel reminder of how trying this year has been.

A discouragingly different season

Maybe you recently decorated your tree, and as you gazed at those familiar Christmas ornaments, your heart warmed with endearing memories of Christmases of old. Nevertheless, in typical 2020 fashion, painful thoughts of quarantines and social-distancing that will make family gatherings difficult or unable to happen at all quickly snuffed out your Christmas cheer.

Maybe you have your list of gifts to buy for your beloved grandchildren and you are trying to navigate online stores, but all of this just feels…empty. Make no mistake, you are grateful that you have the means to send gifts to loved ones, but the thought of sending gifts to family members far away is disappointing. You delight in the intimacy of family gathering in your home, and you love watching your grandchildren’s eyes light up as they open gifts.

Maybe you are planning some sort of celebration, but it won’t be the same this year because you will have that empty seat at the table — the seat that was occupied by a beloved family member who has passed this year. And in an especially painful twist to the year, you know that seat will remain vacant even long after the pandemic is over.

In a year that has been shockingly unlike anything we have ever known before, for many of us, Christmas will be different from all of the Christmases we have previously known.

But, what if it’s during this Christmas season that you dramatically see the Christmas story in a more powerful manner than you have before?

What if a Christmas season of quarantines, FaceTime and empty tables is the time where Christ draws near to you?

A forgotten part of the Christmas story

In the Gospel of Matthew, we read of a part of the Christmas story that is often overlooked. In Matthew 2, after Jesus was born and had been visited by the wise men, an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream and told him to take Mary and Jesus and flee to Egypt. The angel told Joseph that King Herod would soon go on a vicious, murderous rampage as he sought to find this baby boy that had been born — this baby boy that Herod knew would threaten his own rule and reign. Therefore, under the cover of darkness and in the haste of two terrified parents, Jesus’s parents took their baby boy and they fled to Egypt.

Jesus left His home. He was hurriedly separated from His extended family. Do you hear the faint echoes of 2020 — of disruption, separation, and fear?

Our Lord Jesus’s life began in a manger and ended on a cross. Between the manger and the cross, He experienced the harsh evils that inhabit this grotesquely sinful world.

Do you stare at your Christmas tree, or think about the presents in the mail that aren’t being wrapped, or gaze at the empty table and feel a sense of sadness and despair?

Weep. Mourn. Lament. But don’t just dwell upon what you don’t have this Christmas. Fix your eyes on Christ. Look to your Lord who was born in a manger, who fled to Egypt, and who was betrayed by those nearest to Him before He was vilely crucified. Though Herod did not catch and murder the baby Jesus, the sinful rulers who came after Him did eventually capture and kill Jesus.

Jesus knows

One of the purposes of Jesus’s coming – Jesus our Immanuel, God with us – was in order that He might know and experience all of the evil and ugliness that this world can muster. Make no mistake, as God, He already knew the evil and ugliness of this fallen world, but the wonder of Christmas is that He came and experienced it with us.

Christmas is going to be different this year, yet maybe one way it will be different is that the wonder of Christ and His coming will be all the more vibrant because you better know and cling to our Immanuel – the One who knows grief, our loss, our empty feelings that lead to the primal cry of the heart that, “This is not right!”

Tired, weary, hope-starved Christian, take heart that Jesus knows the agonies of this world, this life and even this year. But Jesus didn’t come just to know the agonies of this world, he came to put an end to them.

The sense of cruel sentimentality and grief that Christmas brings this year us will one day be vanquished. Not only do we remember back to Jesus’s first coming, but we also cling to Jesus’s words in Revelation 22:7, “And behold, I am coming soon.” Everything that can be thrown at us in this life will be swallowed up in the perfect presence of King Jesus.

Amen, come Lord Jesus. Come, Immanuel.

Stephen McDonald is the pastor of First Baptist Church of Scituate, MA.