In which we take a break from 1 Peter
Merry Christmas! I hope someday, when someone reads this, they will be blessed by the various Bible studies this site contains. If you have been reading through in order, then I hope you will forgive me a detour to focus in on Christmas, and just why we have such great reason to make merry. Tomorrow, we will jump right back to 1 Peter and pick up where we left off. But, for today, I’d like to focus on the essential wonder and blessing that is the Christmas story.
You know the Christmas story and, until I delve into Luke for our daily exposition, I am going to leave the nuts and bolts of it aside. If you would like to read it in full, please read it here. I would like to spend the short time I have this morning (I am again at my parents’ house, and there will soon be much merry-making indeed as kids and siblings, in-laws, and other siblings either wake up or arrive to begin the festivities) I want to discuss the miracle of Christmas.
What is the greatest miracle?
Redemption through Christ
What would you say is the greatest miracle of all time? I was definitely raised in a church that considered Christ’s death on the cross probably the greatest miracle, followed closely by the resurrection. I do not think this is misguided. It is true that, given the magnitude of the effect of Christ’s death and substitutionary atonement for all believers through the cross, we tend to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of his death. Indeed, it seems to me that, the magnitude of Christ’s sacrifice, especially for people (I name myself among them) who recognize the enormity of their own sin and the punishment it needs must require, can never be appreciated enough.
We are debtors. Many of us have been murderers, adulterers, slanderers, drunkards, liars, thieves, idolators, yet we are forgiven. None of us deserved forgiveness. We deserved destruction, even annihilation. But, we have a loving savior who was willing to bear our guilt and, perhaps even more wonderful, our shame. This cannot be and should not be dismissed or ignored as a trifle. It is humbling and magnificent. There is nothing else in all of time that can bring us to our knees in pain and grief and guilt as we acknowledge our own contributions to his agony. There is hardly anything else in eternity that can bring us such joy.
New hope in Christ’s resurrection
There are also those who have taught that the central miracle of Christianity is the resurrection. Again, I don’t believe this is any sort of terrible error. It is glorious. Certainly, without the resurrection we would be scratching our heads wondering whether there was much to this Christianity stuff anyway. After all, what good would be Christ’s words about the temple, or the sign of Jonah, if he had not risen from the dead? To what would David be pointing when he said the holy one would not see corruption? I think I can make the case that there would be no Church if there were no resurrection.
Side-quest musings…
Here’s a question? After Jesus’ death, did Peter and the other disciples start a local congregation? I would argue the answer is no. What did they do? I can see a couple of things. One, they met together to grieve and morn and argue about what they would do next. Two, they went fishing. I can see it. Peter, having denied Christ and then seen him killed on the cross, threw up his hands, and thought, “Well, now what?” What did he know how to do? He went fishing.
It seems to me, although the intervening time was very short, that Peter likely just went back to work. He was like a man who took a sort of three-year apprenticeship that didn’t really pan out. Jesus was dead, and Peter’s career as Disciple numero uno was over. So, he went fishing. But, then…
No Church without the resurrection
You see? The resurrection is the reason we have the church. I guess Peter might have had some crazy stories to tell, and maybe there would have been a small sect of Jews who tried to emulate Christ after his death. I think one to two generations and then it would have been over. So, we can recognize as the resurrection as the central miracle of the church. In the resurrection, just as Peter would later write in 1 Peter 1, is the reason for our living hope. It is too that hope that we are saved by grace through the mercy of God. (If any of this is confusing, please check out the study, Mercy: The Quest: Day 21.0)
So, is the resurrection the greatest miracle? It is an essential miracle, no doubt. It might be that it is the foundational miracle of the church, but it is still not the most central miracle of the Christian faith. What then is the greatest miracle? Well, wedding planners worldwide would probably cite Christ’s first miracle of turning water into wine, and thus saving the planners from a laundry list of complaints. But, that is not the foundational miracle of our faith.
Christmas is the central miracle of our faith
Let’s think about resurrection again, but take away the incarnation (and thereby Christmas!). Without the Christmas story, Jesus would have been a man who was crucified on trumped up charges, then buried, and then – What? A good man who overcame death? How? Why? I do not want to be blasphemous here, but if not for the incarnation wouldn’t Christ essentially be a sort of well-meaning zombie?
So, no. The incarnation must be the foundational miracle because all the other miracles are only possible in light of it. The Christmas story is one of the divine drawing near to us. Our Creator enters his creation, taking it upon himself. Without this miracle, the rest of the miracles are just remarkable curiosities. Fascinating, to be sure, but otherwise meaningless. In other words, if Jesus were merely a man, you really might say that turning water into wine was his greatest miracle. Why? Because the resurrection of a mere man would do no good for anyone. The sacrificial death on the cross would be purposeless folly.
Christmas miracle
C.S. Lewis wrote the following in his book Miracles.
The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this. Just as every natural event is the manifestation at a particular place and moment of Nature’s total character, so every particular Christian miracle manifests at a particular and moment the character and significance of the Incarnation. There is no question in Christianity of arbitrary interferences scattered about. It relates not a series of disconnected raids on Nature but the various steps of a strategically coherent invasion – an invasion which intends complete conquest and “occupation.” The fitness, and therefore credibility, of the particular miracles depends on their relation to the Grand Miracle; all discussion of them in isolation from it is futile.
C.S. Lewis, Miracles, 143, Touchstone, 1996
Christmas and redemption are forever entwined
St. Athanasius, in his wonderful book, On the Incarnation, ties the incarnation directly to our redemption through the sacrificial death of Christ on the cross. He does go into the resurrection later, but I am running out of time, so we will end with this great quote. Note how he incorporates (see what I did there?) the Christmas story and the story of redemption so perfectly together. This is a long passage, but well worth reading. I hope you read it and have a Merry Christmas!
For this purpose, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world. In one sense, indeed, He was not far from it before, for no part of creation had ever been without Him Who, while ever abiding in union with the Father, yet fills all things that are. But now He entered the world in a new way, stooping to our level in His love and Self-revealing to us. He saw the reasonable race, the race of men that, like Himself, expressed the Father’s Mind, wasting out of existence, and death reigning over all in corruption. He saw that corruption held us all the closer, because it was the penalty for the Transgression; He saw, too, how unthinkable it would be for the law to be repealed before it was fulfilled. He saw how unseemly it was that the very things of which He Himself was the Artificer should be disappearing. He saw how the surpassing wickedness of men was mounting up against them; He saw also their universal liability to death. All this He saw and, pitying our race, moved with compassion for our limitation, unable to endure that death should have the mastery, rather than that His creatures should perish and the work of His Father for us men come to nought, He took to Himself a body, a human body even as our own. Nor did He will merely to become embodied or merely to appear; had that been so, He could have revealed His divine majesty in some other and better way. No, He took our body, and not only so, but He took it directly from a spotless, stainless virgin, without the agency of human father—a pure body, untainted by intercourse with man. He, the Mighty One, the Artificer of all, Himself prepared this body in the virgin as a temple for Himself, and took it for His very own, as the instrument through which He was known and in which He dwelt. Thus, taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death instead of all, and offered it to the Father. This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men. This He did that He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned back to corruption, and make them alive through death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of His resurrection. Thus He would make death to disappear from them as utterly as straw from fire.
St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 56-57, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011
