Article I wrote for the Collegian (school publication)
"Christmas Shopping, Crucifixion, and God in a Meatsuit"
Last year my brother and I made a travesty of Christmas shopping. We hadn’t planned it that way, but it just sort of happened. We headed out in our ponderous tank of a van, and we both wanted Relient K’s new album “Mmhmm,” so we went to Best Buy and David bought it for me. “My gift to you,” he explained, “is that you can just give me this and not have to shop for me this year.” We got our mom—together—a board game that we both would enjoy, and by the time we got our friend Jason the Cliff’s Notes to John Gardner’s Grendel, wishing him a “very postmodern Christmas”, there was no going back.
Incidentally, my mom had already gotten us the Relient K album.
But Christmas gift-giving has always been kind of weird for me, and not just deliberately like last year. If you’re more distantly related to me than “grandparent,” I’m not likely to have the means to get you a gift, and it’s always been like that. I remember in sixth grade there was a “Santa’s Workshop” where we kids could purchase gifts, and my mom gave me $10 for it. It didn’t go very far.
Every year my parents gave me a handful of cash to buy presents for them. I’d get them some useless thing like a tiny pewter dragon or Beanie Baby—I don’t know what I was thinking with that, my dad is not a Beanie Baby person, but the darn things were in vogue and I needed to get him something—that they’d never get themselves. It was like they were getting their own Christmas gifts through some impoverished extraneous middleman, but I’d do it anyway, because that’s how you tell people you love them at Christmastime. I don’t really speak this gift-giving language, but I try anyway, like a foreign exchange student or something. Every year I basically study abroad in the mall, trying to find a gift that says “I loves to you.”
But I really do like the season, even though I don’t speak Consumerism. I like the time off from school. I like just being around my family, sitting on the sofa playing video games or scrawling up the rules for some crazy card game while my mom is reading for fun. I like the lights. I like the Christmas songs.
So I guess Christmas for me has never really been about the gifts. No, wait, actually it has.
See, Christmas for me is about the birth of Jesus Christ: when God gave the gift of Himself to us. God is omnipresent, so it’s not like He’s never around or anything, but at Christmas, I feel His presence in a special way—His Christmas presence. Sorry, couldn’t resist. But sometimes I forget, and the season is God’s reminder for me of when He put on a meatsuit, just like all us humans wear when we’re not wearing anything else. He sent Himself to Earth to let us know what He’s all about.
But this means more to me than just God identifying with humanity, expressing Himself in a way we can understand. Jesus came with a purpose in mind; He wasn’t born merely for the sake of being born.
You’ve got to know a little background to grasp this. At the time of Jesus’ birth, mankind was in dire straits. Ever since God had brought all of Creation into existence and granted man the gift of life, man had been selfishly trampling his fellow man to fulfill his own desires without a thought to even thank his Creator for giving him life.
By all rights God should have killed us for the mess we made of His Creation. Imagine if you were making a painting and you let it paint part of itself, but instead it went out drinking and got beer stains all over the canvas. You’d be perfectly justified in throwing out the painting, and it would be a fair punishment. That’s man’s situation when Jesus was born: guilty of offense against his Artist.
Jesus came on the scene with a purpose: his birth was God’s plan to pay the price for our offense. He arrived on Earth to serve our death sentence on a Roman cross. He was crucified, rose again on the third day, and offers eternal life—freedom from the death penalty that we all deserve—to anyone who will trust Him to give it.
That’s the gift that Christmas is all about to me: eternal life. You don’t earn your way into heaven with good deeds. Fact is, we’re all on the naughty list, and God isn’t going to sacrifice His justice to cross us off for free. Instead, He sacrificed Himself and crossed us off literally (can you tell I like puns?).
The gift’s yours for the opening. Do you want to live your life no longer as a criminal convicted of marring yourself, God’s artistry? Do you want to get free of performance requirements, free to do good things not out of some desperate need to do good, but just because you want to? If you trust Jesus to give you eternal life and free you from your past mistakes, He’ll deliver.
And just to bring it full circle, if you do your good deeds to show God your appreciation for His gift, you’re just giving God back the free will that He gave you—pretty much the same as when I use my parents’ money to buy them matching Christmas mugs.
Last year my brother and I made a travesty of Christmas shopping. We hadn’t planned it that way, but it just sort of happened. We headed out in our ponderous tank of a van, and we both wanted Relient K’s new album “Mmhmm,” so we went to Best Buy and David bought it for me. “My gift to you,” he explained, “is that you can just give me this and not have to shop for me this year.” We got our mom—together—a board game that we both would enjoy, and by the time we got our friend Jason the Cliff’s Notes to John Gardner’s Grendel, wishing him a “very postmodern Christmas”, there was no going back.
Incidentally, my mom had already gotten us the Relient K album.
But Christmas gift-giving has always been kind of weird for me, and not just deliberately like last year. If you’re more distantly related to me than “grandparent,” I’m not likely to have the means to get you a gift, and it’s always been like that. I remember in sixth grade there was a “Santa’s Workshop” where we kids could purchase gifts, and my mom gave me $10 for it. It didn’t go very far.
Every year my parents gave me a handful of cash to buy presents for them. I’d get them some useless thing like a tiny pewter dragon or Beanie Baby—I don’t know what I was thinking with that, my dad is not a Beanie Baby person, but the darn things were in vogue and I needed to get him something—that they’d never get themselves. It was like they were getting their own Christmas gifts through some impoverished extraneous middleman, but I’d do it anyway, because that’s how you tell people you love them at Christmastime. I don’t really speak this gift-giving language, but I try anyway, like a foreign exchange student or something. Every year I basically study abroad in the mall, trying to find a gift that says “I loves to you.”
But I really do like the season, even though I don’t speak Consumerism. I like the time off from school. I like just being around my family, sitting on the sofa playing video games or scrawling up the rules for some crazy card game while my mom is reading for fun. I like the lights. I like the Christmas songs.
So I guess Christmas for me has never really been about the gifts. No, wait, actually it has.
See, Christmas for me is about the birth of Jesus Christ: when God gave the gift of Himself to us. God is omnipresent, so it’s not like He’s never around or anything, but at Christmas, I feel His presence in a special way—His Christmas presence. Sorry, couldn’t resist. But sometimes I forget, and the season is God’s reminder for me of when He put on a meatsuit, just like all us humans wear when we’re not wearing anything else. He sent Himself to Earth to let us know what He’s all about.
But this means more to me than just God identifying with humanity, expressing Himself in a way we can understand. Jesus came with a purpose in mind; He wasn’t born merely for the sake of being born.
You’ve got to know a little background to grasp this. At the time of Jesus’ birth, mankind was in dire straits. Ever since God had brought all of Creation into existence and granted man the gift of life, man had been selfishly trampling his fellow man to fulfill his own desires without a thought to even thank his Creator for giving him life.
By all rights God should have killed us for the mess we made of His Creation. Imagine if you were making a painting and you let it paint part of itself, but instead it went out drinking and got beer stains all over the canvas. You’d be perfectly justified in throwing out the painting, and it would be a fair punishment. That’s man’s situation when Jesus was born: guilty of offense against his Artist.
Jesus came on the scene with a purpose: his birth was God’s plan to pay the price for our offense. He arrived on Earth to serve our death sentence on a Roman cross. He was crucified, rose again on the third day, and offers eternal life—freedom from the death penalty that we all deserve—to anyone who will trust Him to give it.
That’s the gift that Christmas is all about to me: eternal life. You don’t earn your way into heaven with good deeds. Fact is, we’re all on the naughty list, and God isn’t going to sacrifice His justice to cross us off for free. Instead, He sacrificed Himself and crossed us off literally (can you tell I like puns?).
The gift’s yours for the opening. Do you want to live your life no longer as a criminal convicted of marring yourself, God’s artistry? Do you want to get free of performance requirements, free to do good things not out of some desperate need to do good, but just because you want to? If you trust Jesus to give you eternal life and free you from your past mistakes, He’ll deliver.
And just to bring it full circle, if you do your good deeds to show God your appreciation for His gift, you’re just giving God back the free will that He gave you—pretty much the same as when I use my parents’ money to buy them matching Christmas mugs.
posted by Jackson at 8:25 PM
2 comments
