Unavoidable Jesus: Good News on Christmas Eve

Picture yourself in church on Christmas Eve. Understand where you are: you’re sitting in an embassy, the embassy of King Jesus, Sovereign Lord of all. This is why this King has embassies in virtually every neighborhood and, indeed, on every continent throughout the Earth. King Jesus commissioned this embassy centuries ago and set a series of Ambassadors to herald his royal decrees which have been preserved for us in the annals of the King (Scripture), and the efficacious symbols of his Kingdom: Holy Baptism, Holy Absolution, and Holy Communion. This he has done for thousands of years around the known world. 

The King has a perpetual message – news – that must be heralded. He says it’s urgent and for everyone. Yet the news is good: there’s good news about what has happened in real human history: good news about what’s happening under the King’s ongoing rule. The King speaks to his people a regal message of “comfort and joy.” And to those outside the King’s dominion, there’s an official proclamation of reconciliation; there’s a welcoming invitation: Peace; the sovereign King’s goodwill is toward humanity – all humanity. The Great King has sworn to issue nothing but pardoning passage into his kingdom, into the sphere in which he rules directly, the one holy catholic and apostolic church, the visa into which is issued by way of a rite of citizen allegiance: Holy Baptism. There is good news: the King rules and reigns by grace, mercy, truth, peace, and love. Look here, behold his standard, the symbol of his enthronement—the Crucifix—the representation of how he is toward us: restrained, open-armed, speaking words of pardon.

This is King Jesus’ embassy, and you are here on the night in which his ever-expanding, global, millennium-entrenched Kingdom people—who now number in the billions—celebrate the Advent, the nativity of the world’s rightful King: Jesus of Nazareth, true Son of God. Tonight, King Jesus is unavoidable. This is his space, his forum, his message, his night, his right, his rule, his world. And yet the King gladly welcomes all and says to those with ears to hear, “Hear the unavoidable truth.”

Behold his standard, the symbol of his enthronement—the Crucifix—the representation of how he is toward us: restrained, open-armed, speaking words of pardon.

While we are able to avoid grappling with the divinely conceived beings of the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian pantheons because they have no historicity, no corroborating archeological evidence, and no eyewitness accounts, Jesus of Nazareth, on the other hand, stands out in the middle of history like one utterly unavoidable, full-fledged fact. Jesus himself put it like this: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” But as we all know, the truth hurts, and, well, in democratic settings where you are entitled to the pursuit of “life, liberty and happiness,” truths can be unwelcome. The truth that hurts is to be avoided. Jesus is, therefore, to be avoided. He is to be avoided not because the accounts about Jesus are fables but because the Jesus of real, first-century, during-the-reign-of-Tiberius-Caesar-Palestine, forces us into positions of (positively speaking) allegiance or (negatively speaking) treason. But despite our best efforts to avoid him, King Jesus remains very much unavoidable.

The event of Christmas, the fact of the first Christmas, lurks like an unexercised poltergeist haunting the modern mind that would just rather avoid Jesus, avoid talking about the incarnation, avoid the implications of Jesus as the world’s true and rightful King to whom you owe allegiance. Countless people, marching lockstep to the dictates of post-Kantian, postmodern, post-Christian pop culture and pundit ideologies, do their best to avoid the Advent of Christ with preoccupations of consumption. Yet, the incarnation continues to be as unavoidable as extra pounds during the holidays. 

Notwithstanding a person’s irreligiousness, Jesus remains unavoidable to them. Someone wishes them a Merry Christmas in the name of the Lord, and gives them a card depicting the nativity, declaring peace, joy, or glory to God in the highest. Or they receive a gift that bespeaks allegiance to the King or, worse still, drags their butt into the King’s embassy, driving past 100,000 points of light that borrow directly from the biblical record of what took place this night when Quirinius was governor. You cannot even get through the shopping season or escape to Disneyland without hearing Handle’s “Hallelujah” to Jesus chorus or Vivaldi’s “Gloria” to Christ being sung! Jesus Christ is just all over this Christmas thing!

We all have a visceral sense that an 11-foot wind-powered Grinch slumped over our neighbor’s roof looks dumb. Yet, at the same time, even the cheapest Wal-Mart Nativity set conveys meaning, significance, purpose, and occasion. Unavoidable to our conscience is that none of this makes any sense, be it hanging lights, gift-giving, mounting stars, erecting trees, feasting, festivities, holiday celebrations, or eggnog. None of this stuff makes sense unless it’s grounded in some monumental, universal, multi-generational observance of some world-shaping, epoch-making event like the arrival of a King, the Great King, a King of incomparable rule, power, and potency. Get that idea, and you’re getting a sense of why Christmas is celebrated, must be celebrated, and ever will be so, quite unavoidably.

None of this stuff makes sense unless it’s grounded in some monumental, universal, multi-generational observance of some world-shaping, epoch-making event like the arrival of a King, the Great King, a King of incomparable rule, power, and potency.

The Incarnate One is still unavoidable, even when only ever permitted to be depicted in public as a helpless, breast-feeding infant. But the Incarnate One is the Crucified One, and the calendar pages turn and, again, unavoidably, here comes the fact of Good Friday. The King is crucified by his kingdom citizenry. In the ultimate act of high treason, we, the people, crucify the King. We will not have this man rule over us, and yet, our condemnation of him condemns us. Our charge of his treason against our own sovereign rule declares the reality of things back in our faces: here hangs Jesus of Nazareth the King. We’ve got a problem: Good Friday happened, and it has implications.

But let’s avoid Good Friday and treat it like any other work day. Nothing special going on here; back to work, everyone. Listen up, you Christians, the needs of the company take precedence over whatever memory we might have had of what took place between noon and three on a blood-soaked tree staked on Golgotha. Avoid taking off or even taking notice. You can have the infant, so long as he remains adorable and the natural offspring of Joseph, but can we just avoid the bit about how a King represents his people in judgment? Ok, good.

But then Easter — how are we gonna avoid that one? Bunnies and chocolate. Merchandise hijacked Christmas, so let’s roll with our ace. Let’s continue to buy stuff:

• Marshmallow chicks
• Life-like photos with a guy in a bunny suit
• Fake grass in pastel baskets

Some Ghirardelli chocolates should suffice to displace momentary contemplation of the all-or-nothing truth claims of Christianity. Or maybe not.

Despite these cultural embarrassments, he keeps popping up all over the place. It’s like he’s in charge or something, or like there is something utterly irrepressible about him, like this first-century figure is still alive. No matter how hard philosophy, aberrant theologies, academics, atheists, agnostics, pop media, and pundits of false religions try to put him to death, kill his memory, terminate his legacy, purge him from the annals of history, or shift focus to the church’s hypocrisy, it seems that this resurrected Jesus just won’t die again. Our culture of death seems to think that if we killed Jesus once before, we could do so again, and so we can avoid him, avoid the fact of Christmas, the fact of Good Friday, and the fact of Easter. Change the referent to our Gregorian Calendar from BC and AD to BCE and CE, and you still have a dating system based on his birth. But this Jesus is irrepressible, unavoidable, alive and in charge.