Recently I've seen a lot of "Merry CHRISTmas" and a few "Keep Christ in Christmas" and a couple "Jesus is the reason for the season." Frankly, it kind of irritates me.
Christmas is about celebrating Christ's birth. That I am not denying. I don't think that should be down-played or minimized at all. I think we should be able to say "Merry Christmas" without fearing we might offend someone. I think we should keep Christ in Christmas. But I don't think that slapping a catchy little phrase on the birth of the Messiah brings Him even the slightest bit of honor. I actually think it trivializes it even more than the fat guy in the red suit. I don't think that these sayings actually keep Christ the focus of anything. I think they just put a band-aid on a broken world and make us feel good about ourselves.
Some Christians think that by using those catch-phrases they are somehow sharing their faith and spreading the gospel. Um, no. These messages are mundane and insincere. They don't capture the depth and breadth of what happened in that cave two thousand years ago. Instead they just put a nice, palatable, simplistic, sweet-tasting smile at a moment that wasn't nice, wasn't palatable, wasn't simple and sure as heck wasn't sweet-tasting.
Let me re-cap. Jesus, God's only son, became human. Became a baby. His parents were poor. His mother was an unmarried teen. He was born in a cave/stable/outbuilding surrounded by animals and his first bed was a feeding trough. He came as a baby because that's how WE needed Him to come so that we would accept Him because we cannot grasp how magnificent and holy He actually is. From the second He was born until the second He died, people wanted Him dead. And yes, that baby came to this world for one purpose: to die. To die for you. To die for me. To be tortured and hung on a cross.
That is not a sweet moment. That is not palatable. That is off-putting. That is something that a cute little rhyme cannot convey.
And, as if that's not enough, when these words are written, they're in a big happy font. Or when they're spoken, they're spoken with a Dr. Seuss voice. And then the writer or the speaker GOES RIGHT BACK TO THEIR REGULAR DAILY LIVES LIKE NOTHING HAPPENED. As if saying "Jesus is the Reason for the Season" somehow excuses or explains why there's Christmas shopping and baking and wrapping and caroling to do. It's like a commercial.
I don't have a problem with Santa. I don't have a problem with Christmas shopping or baking or card-sending or any of the rest of it. It's all good. But when you take a sacred event like the incarnation and dumb it down with "Merry CHRISTmas" I throw up in my mouth a little bit because Jesus didn't come to earth so that we can make ourselves feel good about over-spending or be self-righteous because we know the "reason" for the season.
And here's the real coup de grace: most of the world -- certainly most of America -- already know that Christmas has something to do with a baby in a manger. What they don't know is why that matters to them. They don't know why they should care. They don't understand why that's important. And no amount of patronizing, puerile mottos will explain that.
So yes, Jesus is indeed the most important part of Christmas. He is Christmas. But can we give that a little more respect than a trivial, mindless saying?
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