Christmas:
The Never-ending Story

Just seems like yesterday that we were celebrating Christmas Eve. Now, it is all behind us and we are in a new year.

Christmas itself seems so climactic. Everything leads up to Christmas Day and then it's over for another 12 months.

But that's not the way it is in the Church Year. The story that began with the birth of Jesus does not reach its climax until His Death on the Cross, Resurrection, and Ascension. Even then we find that it is a never-ending story for He lives on through the Church and He continues to watch over the Church from His Throne of Glory in Heaven at the Right Hand of the Father.

What is impressed upon us during the Christmas Season and throughout the Church Year is that the Incarnation of our Lord was a purposeful act. Before Jesus Christ, we were in bondage under the Law; but when the appointed time came, God sent His Son to be born under the Law so that through Him we might be freed from that bondage and made heirs of the salvation that becomes rightfully ours as children of God.

Our Lord, through His Incarnation, became subject to human conditions, even subject also to the Jewish Law, encompassing the entire Judaic legal system, the Mosaic Law, defined and redefined, encumbering and impossible to keep, bringing us under bondage.

While our Lord did redeem us through His perfect obedience to the Father even to His death on the Cross, and while we have been freed from bondage under the Jewish Law, this freedom is not without some responsibility and obligation as heirs to the Kingdom of Heaven.

When we become baptized into the Body of Christ, our new life begins with repentance and a complete surrender of ourselves to the will of Jesus Christ as our divine Saviour. Without such a complete surrender, we cannot begin to experience the unique blessedness and power of our Christian heritage.

Freed from the bondage of the old Law, we bind ourselves freely to our Lord under the Law of Love. Only by the greatest of Christian sacrifices can we be filled with the inward joy of oneness with our Heavenly Father and enjoy a relationship as His children.

At midnight on Christmas Day, for the secular world it was over and any more "to do" over Christmas became anti-climactic. Yet, for us Christians it is not over.

The joy we experience at this season of the year is ours to enjoy each day of the year if we bind ourselves to Him under the Law of Love.

Let us keep in mind Mary and Joseph and how they responded to a most unusual call from God: each to accept a miracle.

Our technological world, its science, computers, and instant access to boundless information, has made us witnesses to many extraordinary things; we have been so seduced by intellectualism and skepticism that we lose sight of the truly miraculous.

We tend to base acceptance or rejection of almost everything on the amount of empirical evidence available and we even go so far as tending to intellectualize our relationships with each other, not to mention God.

But what makes us human is our relationships, sharing joy, sadness, pain, and pleasure, and most importantly love.

In this new year, if we are going to make any resolutions, let us above all resolve to keep alive in our hearts and in all that we do, the spirit of the Christmas Season as a reflection of the Law of Love, surrendering ourselves to our Lord and Saviour.