Christmas and the Resurrection
Suppose you are taking a qualifying examination and one of the questions in logical analysis is: “Which of the following words do not belong to the same class as the others? - a) Christmas Tree; b) Santa Claus; c) Easter Egg; and d) Mistletoe,” what would your answer be? I’m sure you’d probably select (c). And for obviously good reasons. Easter egg hunting is a favorite western practice on Easter, or Resurrection Sunday. The others are all Christmas fixtures. Two seemingly different holidays or celebrations. Or so we think.
Christmas and the Holy Week are both Christian traditions but are celebrated in totally different manners. With the latter we commemorate the suffering and crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ in a sorrowful manner, coupled with fasting and abstinence, we do the opposite during Christmas – with feasting and partying (and drinking) as if there is no tomorrow. The sheer number of lechon sales in December should be proof enough its increased intake. I don’t have the data but I’m convinced the average cholesterol readings of the entire Philippine population drastically increase at the end of the year!
But they’re not as different as they appear to be – Christmas and the Resurrection. In fact, on a closer look, they’re both the same, part of God’s overall plan for the salvation of man. How happy we are during Christmas, for we celebrate Christ’s birth, the event in history when the eternal and everlasting God, became man – one of us, with all the frailties of humankind. Sure all of us will die, that is a non-arguable truth. But it is totally different with Jesus. For He was born for only one purpose, to suffer and die on the cross that man may be saved. He was born into this world knowing fully well what the future lies in Calvary three decades after.
God’s wisdom our human minds could never comprehend. He is God and He became man, and He grew up as any man does but still remain as God. And He learned the ways of man from birth in Bethlehem to His death in Calvary, and yet He knew everything from beginning to end, and even before and after that. Inconceivable as it seems, He was born a baby in the manger but yet, fully knowing the kind of death He will suffer, nailed to the cross. How painful it could have been. Christmas is not Christmas without the Resurrection, and we can’t celebrate the latter without remembering the former also. They are all part of God’s plan.
A good thirty-three years separate the two events in Christ’s life on earth, with about thirty years uneventful, as He lived with His family in Nazareth. Except for that episode when He amazed the scholars at the temple when He was 12, the Scriptures were silent on those years except that He grew up physically, emotionally, spiritually, and socially. This He experienced as a man and as one of us. How can we ever comprehend the feeling that He had all those years before He entered the ministry at 30, growing up amongst us, and yet seeing the end with the pain and agony of the final and ultimate sacrifice? Only because of His love for us could He have lived and went through His entire life so at the end He will die for us that we may be saved from sin and receive eternal life.
He died on the cross for us but He lives! During Easter, Christians all over the world celebrate the Resurrection because Jesus is alive. But we should be thankful, too, that He was born as the Son of Man, and that’s why we celebrate Christmas. My only hope is that we think less of the Christmas gifts, the bonuses, Christmas trees and sleighs pulled by reindeers, all the partying and eating and merry-making, Santa Claus and all, chestnuts and snow (which we don’t have in the Philippines anyway), and think more of the real meaning of Christ’s birth. Look up to the cross, and thank God that two thousand years ago, Jesus was born a baby in a manger, to live a life as an example for us, to die on the cross for our sins, and to rise again and live forevermore, so that we may live.
Have a Blessed Merry Christmas!
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