The Greatest Gift: Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas (7 page)

GENESIS 28:10-16

You can feel it in your bones sometimes when you stop for a moment —like life’s this stairway that you just never stop climbing, this ladder that goes on forever without end.

Like all these lists are rungs, like your failures stretch from earth up to heaven, like all your rest feels like lying down on one unforgiving stone.

Sometimes you’re just the most tired of trying to be strong.

You have these Jacob dreams, and you dream of what might be. And this is the dream that comes true —that makes all the stressed things come untrue: the real amazing dream is that there are no ladders to climb up, because Christ came down one to get you.

Jesus Christ Himself interprets the dream: “I tell you the truth, you will all see heaven open and the angels of God going up and down
on the Son of Man
, the one who is the stairway between heaven and earth” (John 1:51, emphasis added).

Jesus doesn’t show you the steps to get to heaven —Jesus
is
the steps to heaven.

Jesus doesn’t merely come down to show you the way up —Jesus comes down to make Himself into the Way to carry you up.

Jesus doesn’t ultimately give you a how-to, because Christianity is ultimately about Who-to.

Every religion, every program, every self-help book is about steps you have to take. Jesus is the only One who becomes the step —
to take you
.

To take us who are the Jacobs, the dog tired and the debtors, the deluders and the desperadoes. To take us who are the lost and the long way from arriving, us who are bone weary of all the trying and the striving. Christ becomes the one step we can never take —and takes us. He comes to us like He comes to Jacob —He comes to us not in spite of our failings —but precisely because of them. Ours is the God who is drawn to those who feel down. Ours is the God who is attracted to those who feel abandoned. Ours is the God who is bound to those who feel broken.

Everywhere stairways for the sinners, everywhere ladders for the lost, everywhere gateways to God.

This is grace. This is reason to slow. This is not to be missed.

Why profane His coming with fleshly performances, frantic pushing, futile preoccupations?

Profanity, writes Elisabeth Elliot, is “treating as meaningless that which is freighted with meaning. Treating as common that which is hallowed. Regarding as a mere triviality what is really a divine design. Profanity is failure to see the inner mystery.”
[10]

We could slow and cease the profanity and see the inner mystery of here. Like our own rich variation of the Slow Food movement, we could begin the “Slow Christmas.” We could set aside the to-do lists that profane the inner mysteries and slow to see the weight of glory in the moment at the sink —the divine design of a day that unfolds with a grace that is not to be missed. The hallowed here. Hurry always empties a soul . . .
slow
.

God doesn’t want to number your failures or count your accomplishments as much as He wants you to have an encounter with Him.

The only ladder over you is Love —
and Love came down
.

If, just for a moment, you stand in the doorway, linger a bit in front of the tree, it’s strange how you can see it —how every Christmas tree is a ladder and
Jesus
is your ladder who hung on that Tree . . . so you can have the gift of rest. When you are wrung out, that is the sign you’ve been reaching for rungs. The work at the very heart of salvation is the work of the very heart of Christmas: simply rest.

Here is holy.

The wonder of all this —God looks at you at your lowest and loves you all the way up to the sky.

Grace carries you all the way home.

Like heaven opening up slow everywhere.

Love came down to help us in our helplessness. Today, find someone who is helpless and stoop low in love and service.

It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.

CHARLES DICKENS

When do you find yourself striving, reaching, grasping for the next rung to try to pull yourself closer to God?

How would your perspective on the dailyness of life change if you could see that here is holy?

Take a moment to thank Jesus for being your ladder to heaven and to God.

You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good.

GENESIS 50:20

One day Jacob had a special gift made for Joseph —a beautiful robe. But his brothers hated Joseph because their father loved him more than the rest of them. They couldn’t say a kind word to him. . . .

The brothers killed a young goat and dipped Joseph’s robe in its blood. They sent the beautiful robe to their father with this message: “Look at what we found. Doesn’t this robe belong to your son?”

Their father recognized it immediately. “Yes,” he said, “it is my son’s robe. A wild animal must have eaten him. Joseph has clearly been torn to pieces!” . . .

But now that their father was dead, Joseph’s brothers became fearful. “Now Joseph will show his anger and pay us back for all the wrong we did to him,” they said.

So they sent this message to Joseph: “Before your father died, he instructed us to say to you: ‘Please forgive your brothers for the great wrong they did to you —for their sin in treating you so cruelly.’ So we, the servants of the God of your father, beg you to forgive our sin.” When Joseph received the message, he broke down and wept. Then his brothers came and threw
themselves down before Joseph. “Look, we are your slaves!” they said.

But Joseph replied, “Don’t be afraid of me. Am I God, that I can punish you? You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good. He brought me to this position so I could save the lives of many people.”

GENESIS 37:3-4, 31-33; 50:15-20

There’s a storming mess this side of heaven.

There’s this rising muck, and there’s all of us.

And still there’s this simultaneous global choreography that unfolds on the world stage anyway. . . .

String up a tangle of lights. Set a musty angel atop the tree. Deck the front porch and the back streets and the whole tilted world in this twinkling robe, this tinseled robe. Watch how it all spins in these lit colors.

Yet there is the robe’s hem. There’s always the bloodied, dirty dragging; there’s always the ripped underside of things, the dreams and bits of us and unspoken hopes torn to pieces.

You can feel this —in a torn-up world, being torn apart.

When you are brave, you give yourself the gift of facing and touching the torn places. The places where we’re torn to pieces can be thin places where we touch the peace of God.

Joseph touches his thin place. He feels along the edges of the torn places, and he sees through: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good.”

What was intended to tear you apart, God intends it to set you apart.

What has torn you, God makes a thin place to see glory.

Whatever happens, whatever unfolds, whatever unravels, you can never be undone.

You can stand around a Christmas tree with a family tree like Joseph’s, with cheaters and beaters and deceivers, with a family like Jacob’s, who ran away and ran around and ran folks down. But out of a family line that looks like a mess, God brings the Messiah. What was intended to harm, God intended all of it for good, and no matter what intends to harm you, God’s arms have you. You can never be undone.

No matter what intends to harm you . . .

God is never absent,

never impotent,

never distant.

You can never be undone.

In the middle of all our collective mess stands the most monstrous evil. The wood of the crèche lies torn apart behind the wood of the Cross. The cries of the innocent Babe under the stars of Bethlehem twist into the agonized cries of the innocent Victim atop the injustice of Calvary. The holy dark over the manger gives way to the heinous dark over the Messiah and the slamming hammer and the tearing vein and the piercing thorn —the created murdering the Creator.

The Cross stands as the epitome of evil.

And God takes the greatest evil ever known to humanity and turns it into the greatest Gift you have ever known.

“If the worst things work for good to a believer, what shall the best things?” writes Puritan Thomas Watson. “Nothing hurts the godly . . . all things . . . shall co-operate for their good, that their crosses shall be turned into blessings.”
[11]