“It’s the most wonderful time of the year,” claims Andy Williams. He adds that it is “the hap- happiest season of all, with those holiday greetings and gay, happy meetings when friends come to call.” Christmas is certainly, for most of us, a time of great cheer. It’s a time when many of us get to lay aside our normal earthly pressures and enjoy some ease and relaxation.
But not everyone will experience untold joy this Christmas season. Some will spend Christmas Day alone in hospital. Some will be forced to isolate from gay, happy meetings with friends and family, having tested positive for COVID-19. Some may face Christmas as a brief respite before entering a season of prolonged treatment for dread disease. In other places in our world, Christians will languish in prison or concentration camps. Some will live in pressing fear of arrest or violent persecution. For many Christians, there will be little obviously wonderful about this particular Christmas.
But as we consider the suffering that many Christians will face this Christmas weekend, it may be helpful to reflect on the reality that Christmas is, in many ways, God’s answer to suffering.
Alisa Childers, in her book, Another Gospel, writes of the grief of losing her 21-year-old nephew to a drug overdose just before Christmas a few years ago. She recalls standing in the hospital, looking at his cold body in the hospital bed. “When I looked at him, I felt a level of darkness I’d never felt before. It was as if all hope, light, love, joy, and goodness had been sucked out of the universe, and there was nothing but a doom-filled void. I didn’t feel God’s presence. I didn’t feel his peace.” But she knew where to look for hope. Through previous experiences of darkness, “I had learned to not walk by what I feel but by what I know.” She adds,
When we are faced with immeasurable and unspeakable pain, we have a choice. We can open our hands to the Father and fall at his feet, or we can shake our fist at him and walk away. We can throw the raw magnitude of our doubts, questions, and piercing grief into his capable lap, or we can gather it all up into clenched hands and declare him incompetent . . . or nonexistent. We each have that choice….
Evil and suffering are ugly realities unleashed upon creation by sin, but our Savior stepped into our world, took on human flesh, suffered, and experienced death for us…. Jesus was well acquainted with grief and stood in our place. He felt our pain and died the death we deserve. But the story doesn’t end there. Jesus physically rose and defeated the power of sin and death forever. He didn’t just come to feel our pain—he came to end it. He didn’t just give us an answer to suffering—he became the answer.
For many people, this Christmas may not seem like the most wonderful time of the year. They may face suffering and pain and affliction that they would far rather trade for holiday greetings and gay, happy meetings when friends come to call. Like Alisa Childers, they need to know that, at Christmas, God sent his Son, not only to feel our pain, not only to give an answer to suffering, but to become the answer.
As you meditate today on the meaning of Christmas, thank God that Christ became the answer to human suffering. Ask God to help you, in your suffering, to walk not by how you feel but by what you know.