Our Lord knew both the best and the worst in human experience. As for the best, he joyously broke bread and poured wine with those who saw in him the promise of God’s grace lavished upon all precious children of God whom the world has neglected and rejected at the centers of power and the concentrations of wealth. He extended to the least and the lost the very best he had to offer — the certainty of God’s kingdom proclaimed — “Blessed are you.”
As for the worst, our Lord bore the world’s evil, guilt, shame, bad manners, greed and violence, upon his own neck and shoulders. He carried his cross to the Place of the Skull where he died an ignominious death, just as countless other unnamed suffering souls have done so down through the ages.
And then — he, who was born the meekest of the meek in a lowly manger, set forth suddenly and for all time to break the bonds of death and to remove the shackles of sin. He lifted the eternal darkness by virtue of the unending truth and goodness of God at work through him. That is what is meant by “gospel” — “good news.” The good news is that Christmas is never simply Christmas. For Christmas would have been a long ago forgotten nativity, had it not been for Easter.
The import of Christmas resides not in tinsel and mistletoe, not in gifts placed beneath the Yule tree, and certainly not in the wonderfully popular (pagan) myth of Santa Claus, but in the empty tomb of Easter morn. What happened at Christmas would have come to naught, apart from Easter. Had the tomb of Jesus not been emptied forever, and the Lord risen, then you and I, and all people everywhere, would live as though eternally dead to life, enshrouded in darkness, and without hope.
As it is, “the worst of times” turns out to be “the best of times,” and the best never finally to become the worst. This is reason enough to exclaim “Merry Christmas!” The Christ Event is the singularly merriest of all human events because of what took place at Easter. Beyond and in the midst of this momentary darkness — the creation in all its groaning travail — burns the light eternal of God’s ceaseless love, from which nothing can separate the world. “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32).
Remember this when you postmark your gifts and trim your tree. Remember the Infant Babe of Bethlehem as the “Man of Sorrows” who “bore our grief” and “was wounded for our transgressions” — whom God raised from the dead.
The meaning of Christmas is revealed in Easter encounter. He is alive. And so are we.
Posted Dec. 23, 2003 
Charles Davidson is a Presbyterian minister living in Concord, Va. He is pastor of New Concord church and a therapist with Pastoral Counseling Services of Central Virginia.
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