In the Christmas comedy, “Christmas With the Kranks,” Luther Krank proposes a dangerous idea to his wife, Nora: skipping Christmas. Agreeing to forego all festivities, save their charitable donations to the church and children’s hospital, the Kranks embark on a Christmas-free December. This, of course, puts them at odds with their neighbors, co-workers, and friends. They are ostracized, criticized, and even vilified by their Christmas-loving community. In the words of young Spike Frohmeyer, “You're skipping Christmas! Isn't that against the law?”
Maybe you’ve felt the urge of Luther Krank to put aside all the commercialized fanfare and festive busyness of Christmastime. For many, the Christmas season is a time of year when the to-do list racks up, when the family calendar fills up, when cultural expectations rise, and the weight of pleasing all parties involved can seem unbearable. The most wonderful time of the year can often feel not a little bit miserable.
Amid the holiday madness, we are especially tempted to rush past our creatureliness. We can easily and unintentionally forget – not only what the season is truly about, but – that we, as human creatures, have limits. We pump ourselves full of caffeine and Christmas sweets. We stay up late shopping, wrapping, and decorating. We tell ourselves we can make all the concerts, attend all the parties, purchase all the gifts, and still keep our head on straight and Jesus at the center.
What if this year we wished one another a very “humane” Christmas? I’m not proposing we skip Christmas like the Kranks (God forbid!), but what if this Christmas we tried not to lose our humanity amidst the holiday season?
I’d like to suggest that the reason for the season, the incarnation of the Son of God, rightly understood actually moves us in such a direction.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
These are the familiar – perhaps too familiar – opening words of the Gospel of John. They speak of the true miracle of Christmas, the Son of God taking on human flesh. That Word that was in the beginning with God and was God became the babbling baby boy in the manger on that first noel, Jesus of Nazareth: born in Bethlehem, descendent of David, seed of Abraham, Christ the Lord.
As Christians, we confess that at one and the same time Jesus was both fully God and fully man. As the Nicene Creed says, “We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made; of the same essence as the Father. Through him all things were made.” Then the creed continues, “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven; he became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary, and was made human.” Jesus is at one and the same time Son of God and son of Mary.
How can this be? That is a mystery. But it is a mystery of marvelous import.
Few have thought more about that import than Kelly Kapic. In his masterful book, You’re Only Human, (which I commend to any Christmas wish list) Kapic helps us to appreciate the truth that finitude is not sinful. Put another way, human creatureliness (and it’s attendant limits) is not a bad thing, but a beautiful, God-designed, God-glorifying thing. And there is no greater demonstration of this than the miracle at the heart of Christmas, the incarnation.
As Kapic writes:
Jesus the Messiah is both Creator and Redeemer. Only by seeing the links between creation and re-creation, between Genesis 1 and John 1, can we understand how the lordship of Jesus liberates us. Only in that way can we see and appreciate God’s love for us in our creatureliness rather than in spite of it. In his incarnation, the Creator Lord did not come to destroy his creation but to enter it, to love and heal it.
If God did not send his Son to destroy the very creation he made, but, in order to redeem the creation, became part and parcel of it by assuming a human nature, then how might you and I live differently this Christmas season?
Appreciate Jesus’ body…and yours
Let me ask you a question: did Jesus have a real human body? Of course, he did. There was a real human baby in the manger, right? As Christians, we’re comfortable affirming that. But that might be about as far as we’re comfortable going in affirming Jesus’ full humanity.
“Scratch below the surface,” writes Kapic, “and ask a few uncomfortable questions (e.g., did Jesus go through puberty?), and many believers will become squeamish about affirming fairly normal aspects of the full earthiness of the incarnate Son… We begin to attribute our own embarrassment at our bodily functions to the God who gave them to us.”
Kapic also observes how we tend to focus on the virgin part of the “virgin birth”. However, he reminds us, “Jesus was born just like everyone else, the only difference being that this pregnancy was not initiated by sex with a man (Matt. 1:18-20; Luke 1:34). That is a big difference, and it matters. But we must not lose sight of the fact that Jesus and Mary—in their respective ways—experienced all the other normal parts of fetal development (cf. Luke 2:5).”
If Jesus had a real human body, what does that tell you about your body? Is it possible that as Christians today we have grossly underappreciated the human body because of its “grosser” aspects (you know, things we don’t talk about the dinner table)?
By contrast, Kapic explains, “The God we worship is not embarrassed by his creation; rather, he loves it, and he acts from that love… Our ideas about our own bodies interact with ideas we have about Jesus’s body. We must grow comfortable with our creaturely existence, delimited by embodied living. God fully demonstrates his delight in our humanity, demonstrates that creation is lovely and lovable, in the event of Jesus’ very physical, very human birth.”
God loves the bodies he designed. Jesus assumed a human body just like ours. What, then, might it look like to appreciate the body – even your body – this Christmas season?
For starters, worship the real Jesus. As Kapic writes, “Imagine a baby not more than twenty pounds and crawling around the floor. A real baby. Not the sentimentalized babe in a manger that has no more substance than the Easter bunny. A real peeing, pooping, nursing, squalling, melt-your-heart baby boy. And then try to imagine that this little one is also none other than the Word who is God.” That is something so mysterious and mind-bending, it is awe-inspiring! May your heart be so moved this Christmas season.
And secondly, appreciate that your own body – whatever condition it may be in – is a beloved creation of God. Your body is not trash. Your body is not disgusting. Your body is not an embarrassment to God. I’m not suggesting a sappy “body love” as opposed to “body shaming”, but a radical, religious, God-glorifying and body-honoring appreciation. To quote Kapic, “If we are ashamed of our bodies, of our physicality and finitude, we are in danger of being ashamed of our Creator. But God is not ashamed of our physicality. Why are we ashamed of what he freely loves?” So, love your body, just as God does.
Embrace your limits as Jesus did
In becoming human, the Son of God embraced finitude. In his human nature, Jesus knew what it was like need to sleep, to eat a greasy meal and pay the consequences, to wake up with aches and pains, to bleed, to grieve, to not be able to meet every need. Jesus embraced his human limits.
Kapic argues powerfully:
I am convinced that only when we have grasped the implications of the humanity of Jesus will we be able to properly access our own humanity. The doctrine that the Word became flesh means that God himself affirms our flesh as good, and that affirmation liberates us from apologizing for our creaturely limitations. If we believe that Jesus, who was free from all sin, was fully human, then this means that he considered creaturely restrictions to be part of his good creation and not evil at all. It means that we must not apologize for what the Son of God freely embraces.
The incarnation is the greatest demonstration that God doesn’t condemn you for your limits. He made you that way, and he embraced them in the incarnation. Thus, in so far as we try to break through them or rush past them, we act out of sync with God. When we try to live without limits amid the holiday madness, we are not glorifying the Savior of the World, we are saying we know better.
So, get some sleep, say “no” to a Christmas party, simplify the decorating, the wrapping, and baking this year. You can’t do it all…and God doesn’t expect you to. Embrace the limits God gave you. As Kapic observes, “God’s concern is not to erase or destroy our humanity, but to renew it. Human flourishing comes not in the absence of our creaturely limits but in the healthy wholeness of them.”
Merry Christmas, and may you have a very humane Christmas this year!