I remember teaching school scripture at a school in the inner suburbs of Sydney. It was the first time scripture had been taught at the school. After an Easter assembly one of the young teachers came and remarked how she had found the assembly so helpful as she had always wanted to know what Easter was all about.
Often children who have grown up with no church back ground have no idea that Christmas and Easter are all about Jesus. However they are rarely, if ever, resistant to this connection, just surprised. And who can blame them? The trappings prevail. In rain forests it is not uncommon to see what was an enormous tree almost disintegrated, having been strangled by a parasite fig vine. The parasite has fed off and been supported by the tree, which is slowly ebbing away.
Most of what we value in our society has its roots in the coming of Jesus Christ. The tragedy is that we, by and large, do not understand this, or, if we do, fail to see that it can only be maintained by drawing inspiration and strength from Christ.
The sanctity of human life is affirmed in the Bible. We are made in God’s image as both male and female. This Jewish heritage was taken up by the Christians and given added weight and expression when God the Son came amongst us, taking human flesh. God did not send a philosophy but a person.
Infanticide was rife in the Graeco-Roman world of Jesus’ day. Especially at risk were the deformed, the physically frail and girls. Seneca, whose moral philosophy was on a higher plane than most of his culture, wrote “We drown children who at birth are weakly and abnormal.” An inscription at Delphi reveals that one second- century sample of 600 families had only one percent who raised two daughters. The historian, W.E.H. Lecky, said that “infanticide was one of the deepest stains of ancient civilizations.”
Christians constantly condemned infanticide by teaching the sanctity of life. Not only did it violate the sixth Commandment – no murder- but it failed to understand our value as people made in God’s image and therefore of great value in His sight. Christians showed the value of human life by taking abandoned children into their homes and working for their care.
Our value is seen and can only be fully comprehended when we see that God the Son took our human nature in His birth in order that He could die for us to secure our pardon. Any community that fails to honour Christ will be a diminished one, a pale reflection of what it might otherwise be. And the ones who will suffer most are the young and vulnerable.
Christmas trivialised by a preoccupation with the trappings is like a fiancée throwing away her engagement ring and fussing about the box it came in. There is too much to lose by leaving Jesus out of our lives, but so much to gain by courting His presence.