Our Christmas Meditation
Our Christmas Meditation
Matthew 1:18-25; John 1:14, 18; 14:8-9
A little boy stood before the picture of his absent father, and then turned to his mother and wistfully said, “I wish father would step out of the picture.”
This little boy expressed the deepest yearning of the human heart. We who have gazed upon the picture of God in nature are grateful, but not satisfied. We want our Father to step out of the impersonal picture and meet us as a Person. “The Impersonal laid no hold on my heart,” says Goswami Tulsidas, the great poet of India.* It never does, for the human heart is personal and wants a Personal response.
“Why won’t principles do? Why do we need a personal God?” someone asks. Well, suppose you go to a child crying for his or her mother and say, “Don’t cry, little child; I’m giving to you the principle of motherhood.” Would the tears dry and the face light up? Hardly. The child would brush aside your principle of motherhood and cry for his mother. We all want, not a principle or a picture, but a Person.
The Father has stepped out of the picture. The Word has become flesh. That is the meaning of Christmas. Jesus is Immanuel—God with us. He is the Personal Approach from the Unseen. We almost gasp as the Picture steps out of the frame. We did not dare dream God was like Christ; but he is. Just as I analyze chemically the tiny sunbeam and discover in it the chemical makeup of the vast sun, so I look at the character and life of Jesns, and I know what God’s character is like. God is Christlike.
“You have an advantage,” said Dr. Hu Shih, the father of the renaissance movement** in China, “in that all the ideas in Christianity have become embodied in a Person.” Yes, and the further advantage of our faith is this: The Christmas word must become flesh in me. I too must become the word made flesh. I must be a miniature Christmas.
The Christian spirit is the Christmas spirit, extended through the whole year. It is the attitude toward every person, the atmosphere of every act.
Gracious Lord, as you have stepped out of the picture, help me this day to step out of the picture and let someone see in me the meaning of a Christian. May I be the Christmas message. Amen.
* As quoted in S. Radhakrishnan, The Bhagavadgita (New York: Harper, 1928), 293.
** See Hu Shih, The Chinese Renaissance: The Haskell Lectures, 1933 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934).