Tidings of Comfort

I was going to post my last year’s Christmas post this week, but as a Naval officer, I watched with grief and trepidation this week as not one, but two shootings shook our community. I know people stationed at both Pearl Harbor and Pensacola – “it’s a small Navy,” as we say – and while I haven’t lost anyone personally, the events hit close to home. I wondered if I should take a break from writing about Christmas. And then I remembered this is exactly what Christmas is about.

In order to understand Christmas, we first have to wrestle with the question of evil. Evil, as we have been reminded in recent days, is not a thing of the past. It is not only a thing of savage tribes or tyrannical states. It is among us – in our country, in our workplaces, and in our hearts. It is real, and it is personal.

It is important to remember that while an object or circumstance may be “bad,” there is no such thing as impersonal evil. By definition, “evil” requires moral agency – that is, intelligence, willpower, and choice. Evil always has personality and intention behind it.  In its largest sense, it is an active, intentional campaign waged against this world. And there are some people, whether they admit it to themselves or not, who have chosen its side.

Oftentimes, we ignore this inconvenient truth. We watch movies where these people exist and take pleasure in watching them defeated, but too often we do far too little to defeat the evil actually around us. We ignore it in others, and we ignore it in ourselves. But sometimes, as is the case this week, evil cannot be ignored. It is not just in a movie or a philosophy seminar or a Sunday School lesson; it is face to face with us. And it is scary.

That is why Christmas is so important. It is good news of great joy, not because it’s a festival, not because it’s a fun tradition, not because it involves gifts. It is joy to all people, because God has delivered us from this evil. It is news that rescue has come, that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, that a ladder has been thrown down into the pit, that the ship has turned around to come back for the man overboard. That help is on the way.

When the angels said they brought good news of great joy for all peoples – that Christ the savior was born – that’s exactly what they meant. That God’s champion had arrived to rescue the world. It wasn’t joy because the baby was cute, or because everyone was in the mood to take off work, string some garlands, and act nicer than the rest of the year. That isn’t the Christmas spirit.

The real Christmas spirit starts with fear and danger, with threat and pain and death. Christmas is important precisely because of these things; it is a celebration of their overthrow. We live in a world that desperately needs tidings of comfort and joy. We need a champion to come and fight for us against evil. And that, coincidentally enough, is exactly what last year’s Christmas post was on.

My mother’s favorite Christmas carol is “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen.” It goes like this:

God rest ye, merry gentlemen; let nothing you dismay –

Remember Christ our Savior was born on Christmas day

To save us all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray.

Oh, tidings of comfort and joy! Comfort and joy! Oh, tidings of comfort and joy!

It might help, in understanding the meaning of these words, to take them out of their familiar, semi-archaic form and put them in plain English. So if you’ll allow me to paraphrase:

This is a message, in today’s harrowing world, that we all very much need to hear. So let us sing it loudly – and remember to live it out afterwards.

Photo of Pensacola shooting victims from Boston Globe.