Or straining extra-hard to hear.
Good news? A child is born to us- a son is given to us.
Immanuel.
God with us.
God incarnate.
God for us.
Doing my revision for Conversing with Barth, I had a moment where I had to just sit and consider that.
Stopped short by the good news of God for us.
And Christmas, far from being a pleasant story to entertain the children, is a moment of truth for humanity. The truth is that our ideas about God are all messed up. THIS is our God- the God about whom the angels sing. Wrapped in swaddling bands and lying in a manger, having opted for all eternity to be so. Was it really a virgin birth? I don’t know. Did the baby Jesus really ‘no crying make’? I doubt it. But it was a real birth. A birth into the bustle of the real world, unnoticed by many. Noisy and messy and by many accounts nothing special.
And perhaps we’ve heard it so many times that it has become nothing special… a story for the children or a pleasant tradition or just something recited, passed over by so many cliches that the absolutely astounding, time-stopping, world-changing significance is missed.
I’m not going to go off on a rant about commercialised Christmas or about Santa or about nativity plays. I like all those things. I just wonder if maybe we’d all benefit from stopping for a minute and hearing the angels sing and realising that this really is good news- so good it’s almost unbelievable.
